Perplexity hit 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas said at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit. The AI search engine is growing 20% month-over-month.
Srinivas predicts a billion queries per week within a year if growth continues. He compared current numbers to day one in 2022, which saw just 3,000 queries.
The next big push is Comet, Perplexity’s new AI browser. Srinivas called it a “cognitive operating system,” not just another browser. 
“If people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention,” Srinivas said.
“Everything in the search bar, everything on the new tab page, everything you’re doing on the sidecar, any of the pages you’re in, these are all going to be extra queries per active user, as well as seeking new users who just are tired of legacy browsers, like Chrome. I think that’s going to be the way to grow over the coming year.”
Comet aims to shift AI from just answering queries to completing browsing tasks with one command. Srinivas mentioned rethinking the browser by blending client and server computing.
“You really need to actually have a browser and hybridize the compute on the client and the server side in the most seamless way possible,” he said.
“And that calls for rethinking the whole browser.”
The company wants Comet to be always available for work or life, proactively managing browsing sessions and user needs.
“It’ll be there for you every time, anytime, for work or life, as a system on the side, or like, just going and doing browsing sessions for you,” Srinivas said.
“And I think that’ll fundamentally make us rethink how we even think about the internet. Like, earlier we would browse the internet, but now people are increasingly living on the internet. Like a lot of our life actually exists there. And if you want to build a proactive, personalized AI, it needs to live together with you, and that’s why we need to rethink the browser entirely.”
Perplexity also plans to use Comet to track user activity beyond its app to sell premium ads. This ad model mirrors Google’s early growth strategy.
The release date is still TBD but Srinivas tweeted Comet will arrive in “three to five weeks.”
Comet will have a native virtual meets recording, transcription and searches over them. Won’t be part of the first release, but very fast follow up. As for release date: it’s going to take a min of three weeks and a max of five weeks. Reliability and latency have improved over…
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) May 13, 2025
