Perplexity just rebuilt its Comet browser assistant

If your daily workflow involves juggling twenty different browser tabs while manually copying numbers into a spreadsheet, Perplexity has good news for you.

Perplexity has launched a completely reimagined version of its Comet Assistant, rolling it out to all users of its Comet browser. The updated agentic helper can now tackle longer and more complex jobs, perceive web structures better, and most importantly, work across multiple browser tabs at the same time.

In internal benchmarks, Perplexity claims the new assistant performs 23% better than its previous version.

True multitasking across your tabs

Ever since Comet first debuted in July, users have turned to its built-in assistant for tedious digital chores like travel planning, job hunts, and endless research tasks.

But the real world rarely lives inside a single web page. Real workflows require context from multiple sources, like grabbing product specs from one site and pasting them into Google Sheets on another.

Perplexity upgraded Comet Assistant under the hood with new tools for perceiving and interacting with web environments. This means it handles messy, complex website layouts far more reliably without getting stuck.

It is also a true multitasker now. The assistant can see and work across several open tabs simultaneously, eliminating the need for users to bounce back and forth during data entry tasks.

Perplexity highlighted a few jobs you can delegate right away, such as scanning LinkedIn for niche product manager roles, comparing major flight sites to find the cheapest route from San Francisco to New York, or building an automated breakdown of school attendance records in a spreadsheet.

To keep privacy intact, Perplexity introduced a new permission model. Whenever an action benefits from running directly in your browser, Comet will ask for confirmation first, sticking to your chosen boundary throughout the entire workflow.

Why it matters

Browser-based AI agents have spent the last year stuck as glorified sidebars. Most of them can only read whatever single tab you have open, leaving you to do the actual heavy lifting whenever two websites need to talk to each other.

Perplexity solving cross-tab execution turns the browser helper into something that actually feels like an agent. If you spend hours cross-referencing information, sourcing candidates, or price checking, it is definitely worth testing right now to offload your manual data entry.

Strategically, this shows Perplexity doubling down on owning the browser surface itself. Competing with Google on search alone is brutal, but embedding an autonomous agent directly inside the browsing environment lets Perplexity execute tasks instead of just serving links.

That said, the real challenge will be reliability in edge cases. A 23% improvement is great on paper, but complex web forms and strict anti-bot barriers can easily derail autonomous workflows. Letting users dictate browser interaction permissions is a smart safety valve, but whether it can consistently nail multi-step tasks without hand-holding remains the real test.