Perplexity AI, known for its cutting-edge artificial intelligence, plans to launch its own browser, Comet, in May 2025. The new browser will aim to transform ad targeting by gathering extensive user information both within and outside the app. This shift into the browser market reflects the company’s intention to offer highly customized advertisements driven by deeper insights into user activity.
Why Does Perplexity Want to Build a Browser?
According to Perplexity’s CEO, Aravind Srinivas’ statements on a recent podcast, one of the motivating factors for building Comet was to harvest data of user’s activities on the Internet, which go beyond their queries. As stated by Srinivas:
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you.”
Perplexity aims to construct a detailed user profile, and augmenting such user profiles will grant Perplexity insight into user behaviours such as the duration of browsing, the websites being visited, purchasing patterns, and even the locations where the users reside, thereby enabling Perplexity to provide better-suited ads.
eMarketer states advertising spending for the digital economy is on the rise and is currently estimated to reach $700 billion by 2025. This boost can be attributed to the increasing reliance on user data for advertising purposes. From the perspective of unprecedented advertisement spending, Perplexity is entering the market with Comet, and this underlines the importance of Comet in driving revenue for advertisement. Advertising revenue is seeing a continual surge and further assists Srinivas’s proposal that the company plans to enhance advertisement user-context access derived from behaviour-based targeting using Comet data. For a long time, Google has gathered data using services like Chrome, but now Perplexity wishes to enhance the capabilities of its AI-driven search as well as ad targeting through its forthcoming web browser.
