AI company Perplexity working on its own browser, preparing to show targeted ads to the user

AI company Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas recently told in an interview with TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordy Hayes that the company is building its own browser, "Comet". Srinivas clearly said, "We want to collect your data even outside the app so that we can understand you better."

Perplexity intends to do a deeper analysis of users' behavior through the Comet browser and then show targeted ads on that basis. According to Srinivas, "We want to create a better user profile by collecting more context about you, and then show ads through our Discover feed." Srinivasa said that the browser should have been launched earlier, but it is getting delayed due to technical complications. Now it is expected that the Comet browser will be released by mid-May 2025.

The Comet browser will also be based on Chromium. The same open-source platform on which browsers like Arc, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox are built. The strategy of collecting data through the browser and showing advertisements seems quite similar to the model of Google Chrome.

A monopoly trial is going on against Google in the US. If the court decides that Google has to sell Chrome, then Perplexity has shown interest in buying Chrome. Perplexity's Chief Business Officer, Dmitry Shevlenko, says that they can run Chrome at its current level without additional cost. Yahoo and OpenAI are also in the race to buy Chrome.