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ZDNET's key takeaways
Comet is now available globally for free.
It debuted in July for $200-per-month.
It's part of a broader industry effort to AI-ify browsers.
Perplexity announced Thursday that its AI-powered web browser, Comet, is now available everywhere for free.
Launched in July through the company's $200-per-month Perplexity Max service, the browser comes with a built-in AI agent that can track users' browsing activity and interact with third-party websites and apps. Perplexity has marketed its new browser as a more intuitive, dynamic, and engaging alternative to traditional browsers like Chrome and Safari, which the company has painted as antiquated, one-way portals to the internet -- though Gemini is now integrated directly with Chrome.
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Comet is positioned as an AI companion that gently tugs on people's innate inquisitiveness as they navigate the web, leading them to discover new and unexpected information.
"Comet is a browser that learns with the user and enables them to go deeper where it matters most," a Perplexity spokesperson told ZDNET. "Over time, it becomes a second brain, powering discovery, curiosity, and action."
Millions of people have signed up to access Comet since its July debut, according to the spokesperson. All Perplexity free, Pro, and Plus users can try it starting today by downloading it here.
A new era of the internet
Google Chrome and Apple-owned Safari have long been the world's most popular web browsers by a significant margin, but Perplexity has been pushing aggressively to attract users to Comet and, by extension, to its broader vision of a paradigm shift in the very nature of browsing. Last month, for example, the company offered a free trial of Comet to students, as well as a free year for PayPal and Venmo users.
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In an op-ed published last month in Arena, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srivinas argued that the rise of AI was ushering in a new era for humanity, "the Question Age," in which the barriers to pursuing one's curiosity and thus gaining a deeper collective understanding of the universe would be lower than ever before in history.
"In an age where AI holds nearly limitless information," he writes, "the people who thrive will be those who never run out of questions. The great industrialists, the leading capitalists, the winners of this new era will all be the most curious."
Growing competition
Other tech developers have also been investing in AI-powered web browsers, driven by the idea that people in the future will prefer to interact with agents to help them find information online, as opposed to being left to their own devices.
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Software giant Atlassian, for example, recently purchased The Browser Company for a reported value of $610 million and with the goal of giving a major AI upgrade to the Dia browser, specifically with an eye toward selling the new browser to knowledge workers.
Google, meanwhile, has begun rolling out Gemini in Chrome -- the company's flagship generative AI chatbot can respond to user questions about open webpages and perform tasks that require pulling information from across multiple tabs.