The AI-native browser Comet by Perplexity is no longer gated under the premium plan. The firm has made the product open to everyone at no charge, moving its ambitious vision for web browsing from the bleeding edge of early adopters to a more mainstream audience.
Debuted in a $200-per-month Max tier, Comet revolves around an embedded agent capable of contextual awareness across pages and helping you take action on what you find. And now, without a paywall in the way, those of us with free, Pro, and Plus accounts can install it and find out exactly how an “agentic” browser changes your daily browsing habits.
- What Comet Actually Does Inside the Agentic Browser
- How It’s Different From Chrome And Safari
- Adoption and Availability as Comet Opens to All Users
- Privacy and Security Questions for Agentic Browsers
- The Larger Change in Search and the Question-First Web
- Bottom Line: What Comet’s Free Release Could Change
What Comet Actually Does Inside the Agentic Browser
Comet intertwines a conversational AI interface with conventional navigation. The agent can follow your browsing (with permission), look up what’s on the screen, make requests of third‑party sites or apps, among other things. It’s your research buddy, and it remembers the trail you took.
In practical use, this includes things like pulling and synthesizing from long PDFs while you skim, comparing specs across multiple retailer pages, or drafting an email based on notes and links you’ve just collected.
It can also execute chained actions — like pulling data from a report, formatting it into a table, and preparing the summary you’re going to share — without requiring you to juggle tabs.
How It’s Different From Chrome And Safari
Traditional browsers treat each tab as an island. Comet stitches those islands together into a single, context‑aware session that allows you to query your own browsing trail and keep the agent “on the case” as you go. It’s less about typing queries into a box and more about carrying on a conversation with an incredibly smart assistant who knows what you’re looking at — whether it’s written or visual material, or even identifiers for objects around you.
The timing is strategic. Google’s Chrome and Apple Safari command around two-thirds and a fifth of global market share, respectively, due to speed, extensions and tight operating system (OS) integration if StatCounter stats are anything to go by. Google has already started incorporating Gemini into Chrome so that it can answer questions about open pages and pull information between tabs. Comet is looking to bypass that by making the agent the top priority, rather than a sidekick.
Adoption and Availability as Comet Opens to All Users
Perplexity notes that millions showed interest after Comet’s launch, a promising signal considering how ingrained browsing habits are. By dropping the fee and opening up access to every account tier, the company is gambling that getting hands-on time will turn idle curiosity into daily use.
The shift comes after aggressive outreach, including a wide student trial and a free year for PayPal and Venmo users. Those promotions note a playbook targeted at seeding the agent among knowledge workers and students — audiences that feel the pain of tab overload and repetitive online tasks.
Privacy and Security Questions for Agentic Browsers
Agentic browsers raise legitimate concerns. Anything that can read the contents of the page, click buttons on it, or draft input to its forms could accidentally misbehave with sensitive data unless carefully sandboxed. Organizations like the EFF and the OWASP community regularly advocate least‑privilege models, explicit permission requests, and full transparency about what data is being processed.
Some common‑sense remedies for users include keeping separate work and private profiles, turning off agent actions on bank and health portals, reading permission dialogs, and clearing sessions occasionally. For teams, seek admin controls, data retention policies, and audit logs tailored to match internal compliance requirements as well as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
The Larger Change in Search and the Question-First Web
AI is slowly bringing about what Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has called a “question‑first” era, in which curiosity guides discovery and software eliminates friction. Comet is that stance: Rather than index the web and serve up links to you, it revolves around what you’re trying to do and serves as a companion in your effort.
The industry momentum is real. Atlassian’s $610 million acquisition of The Browser Company, intended to develop an AI‑first Dia browser for knowledge workers, as well as Google’s Gemini rollouts in Chrome, show that agent‑augmented browsing is emerging as a market. There are also greater proportions of nonwhites and those with lower levels of education who have tried AI tools for information‑seeking than is the case for news use more generally.
Bottom Line: What Comet’s Free Release Could Change
Making Comet free removes the biggest barrier to trying an agent‑driven web experience. If it can prevent tab sprawl, accelerate research, and deliver consistent citations without compromising data security, it will earn a place alongside — or even in lieu of — your default browser. The real question now is, can an AI companion undo years of muscle memory ingrained in search boxes and bookmarks?
