Perplexity Comet AI Browser

Perplexity's Comet is an unusual product in that it asks almost nothing of you up front. It is built on Chromium, so your extensions, bookmarks and muscle memory survive the move intact, and the core browser no longer costs anything on Windows, macOS, iOS or Android. That is a dramatic change in posture from a product that launched in mid-2025 as a $200-per-month perk of Perplexity's Max tier, and it makes Comet far easier to recommend trying than it was a year ago.

What you get for that is a persistent sidecar assistant that can see your open tabs, summarise what you are reading, pull citations out of pages you already have in front of you, and — in theory — go off and do multi-step work on your behalf. That framing tells you exactly who this is for: researchers, writers and analysts who live in twenty tabs and spend their day reconciling sources. If you mostly browse to shop and watch video, the AI layer is pleasant but not transformative. If you are a developer who leans on DevTools, this isn't the Chrome replacement you were waiting for, and anyone whose main pain point is tab chaos rather than reading load will still find more thoughtful answers elsewhere.

The honest summary is that Comet is excellent at the boring half of its pitch and shaky at the exciting half. As a reading and research companion it feels like the browser Perplexity was always going to build: the sidebar is well-placed, citation-pulling is the kind of small feature that quietly saves real time, and the Chromium foundation means almost nothing about day-to-day browsing gets worse in exchange. Voice mode and Deep Research being available without paying is generous, though the details around voice are thinly documented and I'd treat them as subject to change.

Agentic browsing is where the enthusiasm has to stop. The pattern in testing is consistent — research gathering and form-filling land, longer task chains fall over often enough that nobody sensible would hand it a payment method. Layer on the documented prompt-injection exploits published by Brave and LayerX in 2025, and the calculus is uncomfortable: the feature that justifies an AI browser's existence is also the feature with the largest attack surface. An assistant with eyes on every tab is a wonderful research tool and a worrying security boundary, and Perplexity hasn't yet shown that it has closed that gap.

There is also some fog around the commercial story. The paywall has clearly dropped, but the public record disagrees on when, and the division of features between free, $20 Pro and $200 Max is murky enough that the practical answer appears to be: the reading assistant is free, serious automation still wants Max. That is a steep ask for a capability I wouldn't trust unsupervised.

Rated as what it reliably is today — a very good free AI reading and research browser with an ambitious, unfinished automation layer — Comet earns a solid recommendation. Install it as a second browser, use the sidebar heavily, and keep the agent well away from your credit card.