Perplexity's Comet Plus pays publishers for human and agent traffic

For months, Perplexity has been the target of furious newsrooms accusing the AI search engine of freely scraping original reporting without sending a single visitor back. Now, the company is finally opening its wallet to make peace.

Perplexity just introduced Comet Plus, a new subscription service bundled with a $42.5 million revenue-sharing program designed to compensate publishers whose content powers AI search results and automated workflows.

The service costs $5 a month as a standalone subscription and will be included at no extra charge for existing Perplexity Pro and Max members. CEO Aravind Srinivas described the new offering as essentially an enhanced Apple News+ built for both humans and AI agents to consume the web.

Paying for agent actions, not just clicks

Traditional digital media economics rely entirely on human pageviews and ad impressions. Perplexity argues that this model is obsolete now that software agents read the web on behalf of people.

Comet Plus establishes a revenue-sharing model across three distinct buckets of traffic: manual human visits, citations in Perplexity search answers, and agent actions when the Comet Assistant scans calendars or completes multi-step tasks across publisher articles.

Perplexity says it will distribute subscription revenue back to participating outlets after deducting minimal computing expenses, with reports indicating media organizations could receive up to 80% of the proceeds.

While the program is open for publisher sign-ups, Perplexity hasn't named any launch partners yet. The full roster will be revealed once the Comet browser rolls out to all users for free.

A peace offering under legal fire

The timing of the announcement is anything but coincidental. Perplexity is navigating severe legal pressure from legacy publishers across the industry.

News Corp’s Dow Jones has filed active copyright lawsuits against the company, while media powerhouses Forbes and Condé Nast have both issued cease-and-desist notices over alleged content theft.

By pledging tens of millions of dollars directly to newsrooms, Perplexity is trying to reshape its image from an unauthorized web scraper into a collaborative partner creating a viable business model for the AI era.

Why it matters

For power users, Comet Plus could theoretically offer a clean bypass around fragmented paywalls. Getting automated summaries grounded in premium, verified reporting without managing dozens of media accounts is a compelling pitch, especially since Pro subscribers get it bundled for free.

For the media landscape, Perplexity is the first major player to formally acknowledge that automated AI agent actions represent billable consumption. This move puts pressure on OpenAI and Google, who have largely favored private, exclusive licensing deals with select mega-publishers rather than transparent revenue-sharing pools.

However, the fundamental math looks questionable for publishers. Splitting a tiny fraction of a $5 monthly fee across dozens of outlets feels like pennies on the dollar compared to traditional subscription revenue.

We see this $42.5 million pledge less as a sustainable media rescue package and more as an expensive public relations defense. While validating agent traffic as billable is a clever conceptual shift, it remains unclear whether these micro-payouts will be enough to get copyright lawyers off Perplexity's back.