Perplexity enhanced its AI-powered Comet browser with a new $5 monthly subscription service called Comet Plus, which, at first glance, seems like Perplexity looked out at the bleak, ad-choked wasteland of modern digital publishing and decided it could offer something better to consumers and publishers. It's a simple pitch. With Comet Plus, you get AI access to premium news content, such as Gannett and Der Spiegel, with 80 percent of subscriber fees paid directly to those publishers.
And Perplexity is paying publishers in three ways: when people visit a story from the browser, when their content is cited in a search answer, and when an AI agent uses their content to complete a task for you. The idea is that if content is valuable to us in that context, publishers should be paid for that value, and consumers should get something special.
