Perplexity AI has created a new revenue sharing opportunity for publishing partners affiliated with its Comet browser. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says the company has allocated $42.5 million in revenue to be shared among “a group of trusted publishers and journalists” supporting the company’s products with premium content. Publishers will be apportioned funds based on how much traffic their content generates across the debuting subscription model Comet Plus, as well as the Comet browser and Comet’s AI assistant. Publishers will get 80 percent of the revenue generated from the Comet Plus subscription with Perplexity keeping the rest.

“Publishers are trapped in the now-primitive economics of clicks and page views,” Perplexity writes in a blog post that points out “AI is an intrinsic part of how we browse the Internet.”

“When you ask Perplexity to synthesize recent coverage of an industry trend, that’s indexed traffic,” according to the company. “When Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles relevant to your day’s meetings, that’s agent traffic. Each represents real value creation, yet traditional models only compensate for the first.”

“The media industry has clashed with artificial intelligence companies over concerns that AI-generated responses from tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews have cut valuable web traffic to their sites,” writes Bloomberg.

“Perplexity will pay publishers for news articles that the artificial-intelligence company uses to answer queries,” notes The Wall Street Journal. “Publishers will get 80 percent of Comet Plus revenue, including from the more expensive subscription tiers that provide Comet Plus free of charge.”

Launched this week, Comet Plus provides subscribers “direct access to the sites and content of participating publishers, empower their AI assistants to complete tasks on those sites, and benefit from direct answers informed by the highest-quality content on the web,” Perplexity’s blog post says.

Perplexity launched free AI search in December 2022, then launched the Comet browser in July for those with a $200 monthly subscription to Perplexity Max, as reported by CNBC. A basic version is now available free.

Related:
How Perplexity’s New Revenue Model Works, According to Its Head of Publisher Partnerships, Digiday, 8/26/25
Perplexity’s Comet AI Web Browser Had a Major Security Vulnerability, CNET, 8/26/25
Perplexity Sued by Japanese Media Giants for Stealing Information and Presenting False Information. Engadget, 8/26/25