Perplexity launches Comet Plus to pay media outlets
Perplexity announces Comet Plus, a 5-dollar subscription that provides access to premium content and lets its assistants use that content to answer questions and perform tasks. The company will distribute revenue among media outlets based on human visits, search citations and AI agent actions.
Perplexity has announced Comet Plus, a 5-dollar-a-month subscription that provides access to premium content from participating media outlets and journalists. It will also allow the company’s AI assistant to perform tasks on those sites and use their content to provide direct answers.
The service is presented as a response to an increasingly visible problem: AI can benefit from the work of media outlets without traditional visits being the only way to compensate them.
One payment for three types of traffic
Perplexity wants to distribute Comet Plus revenue among participating media outlets, subtracting a small portion to cover its computing costs. The split will account for three types of interaction:
- Human visits, when you go directly to a website.
- Search citations, when Perplexity uses and links to information from a media outlet to build an answer.
- Agent actions, when the AI assistant browses a website and completes tasks on your behalf.
The difference matters. Until now, many digital business models have measured value almost exclusively through clicks and page views. But you can receive information from an article without opening it, for example by asking Perplexity for a summary of recent coverage of an industry.
What you get as a user
With Comet Plus, subscribers will be able to access the sites and content of participating media outlets directly. Their assistants will also be able to interact with those pages to help you with specific tasks.
For example, you could ask for a summary of several current-affairs articles, receive an answer based on authorized media content or ask the assistant to find relevant information for a meeting. The idea is for journalism to remain useful even if you do not consume every article in the traditional way.
The service will cost 5 dollars per month as a standalone subscription. Users on Perplexity’s Pro and Max plans will have it included.
The media outlets have not been announced yet
Perplexity has not yet published the initial list of participating media outlets and journalists. The company says it will announce it when the Comet browser becomes available for free to all users.
That leaves some details unresolved: which publications will be part of the program, what content will be included and exactly how the split will be calculated for each partner. For now, interested media outlets can apply to participate through Perplexity.
Comet Plus reflects a central dispute of the AI era: if assistants answer using the work of journalists and editors, value should not be measured only by how many people click. What remains to be seen is whether this model can attract enough media outlets and whether users consider that access worth paying another 5 dollars per month.