This article was AI-generated as part of an experimental historical-content project. The date reflects the period being analyzed rather than the date the article was originally written.
For about thirty years the browser has been a fairly neutral container. It displayed pages, and something else, usually a search engine, decided which pages you saw. A lot of reputation management grew up around that division: you worked on the search results, and the browser simply showed them.
Perplexity’s Comet, launched yesterday, is a browser that does not keep that division.
What Comet is
Comet is built on Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome and Edge, and runs on Windows and Mac. According to The Verge, it uses Perplexity as its default search engine, so a query typed in the address bar returns an AI-generated, cited answer rather than a list of links. A built-in assistant in a sidebar can answer questions about the page you are on, summarize or explain text, and carry out tasks such as booking a meeting, sending an email or buying a product. Perplexity’s own post suggests asking Comet which other sites have the same bike but ship it faster, or asking it to compare what you are reading with something you read earlier. Reuters noted that the browser stores data locally. For now Comet is available to subscribers of Perplexity’s $200-a-month Max plan, with invite-only access rolling out to a waitlist over the summer.
Three steps that used to be separate
It helps to break apart what happens when someone looks into a company.
The first step is retrieval: deciding which sources are relevant. Conventionally a search engine does this, and the results page shows its choices.
The second is reading: the person opens pages and forms an impression. The browser displays those pages but does not interpret them.
The third is acting: the person decides to buy, book, get in touch or leave.
In Comet, one system takes part in all three. The address bar returns an answer engine’s synthesis. The sidebar reads whatever page is open and can summarize it, so even when someone clicks through to your own site, an assistant may be telling them what your site says. Then the same assistant can act on it, comparing sellers or completing a task.
What changes for brands
Two consequences stand out.
The session becomes the unit of impression. A conventional search produces a results page you can capture and audit. A Comet session is a sequence: an answer, a page, a summary of that page, a comparison with other pages, perhaps an action. The impression is the sum of those steps, and it is shaped by follow-up questions along the way. There is no single page to monitor.
And your own page is no longer read only by the visitor. If the sidebar summarizes your pricing page, your returns policy or your press release, the summary is what the visitor carries away. Pages written to persuade a person reading from the top may compress badly. A qualification sitting in the fourth paragraph may not make it into a three-line digest.
Early last year I wrote that Perplexity’s funding was a bet that cited answers become the new homepage. Comet goes a step further. The answer engine is not just a destination. It is the frame around every other destination.
What to try now
Comet’s audience is small for the moment, but the pattern, an assistant in the browser reading along with the user, is not unique to it. The useful exercises are simple. Open your key pages with an AI sidebar and ask for a summary the way a skeptical customer would. Check whether the facts that matter, prices, terms, dates, ownership, survive the compression. Then run a comparison task involving your product and note which sources the assistant reaches for and which it ignores.
The address bar used to send people to the web. Now it can tell them what the web says before they get there.