Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a monthly subscription that pays participating publishers when people read their work and when AI systems use it to answer questions.
The company says subscriber payments go to partners, with a small portion retained to cover compute costs.
How Comet Plus Works
Comet Plus will be available for $5 per month. Existing Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers will have Comet Plus included.
Subscribers get direct access to participating publisher sites, answers informed by those sources, and agent workflows that can complete tasks on those sites. The offering is tied to the Comet browser and assistant.
About Revenue Sharing
Perplexity positions Comet Plus as a compensation model for an AI-centric web.
Publishers are paid for three interaction types:
- Human visits
- Search citations
- Agent actions.
Perplexity’s example of “agent traffic” is Comet Assistant scanning a calendar and suggesting relevant reading from publisher sites.
The idea is to reflect how people now consume information across browsing, AI answers, and agent workflows.
Perplexity wrote:
“Comet Plus is the first compensation model… based on three types of internet traffic: human visits, search citations, and agent actions.”
Availability
Interested publishers can email publishers@perplexity.ai to request to join the program.
Why It Matters
For publishers and marketers, the model expands monetization and measurement beyond traditional clicks.
Websites are testing a range of responses to AI usage of their content, from blocking crawlers to signing licenses.
Comet Plus differs from flat-fee deals by tying payouts to actual user and assistant activity, which could align compensation more closely with real demand.
Looking Ahead
Perplexity says it will announce an initial roster of publishing partners when the Comet browser becomes available to all users for free.
Early adoption, reporting transparency, and real revenue for partners will determine whether this model becomes a viable framework or stays a niche experiment.
