Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed onstage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday that Perplexity got 780 million searches in the month of May. According to Srinivas, the AI search engine is growing by more than 20% every month. With 22 million active users, $100 million in recurring revenue annually, and plans to debut its Comet browser in a matter of weeks, the AI search engine is still growing at a breakneck pace and is looking for capital that could raise its valuation to $18 billion.
With CEO Aravind Srinivas aiming to handle 1 billion inquiries per week by the end of 2025, Perplexity’s steady 20% monthly growth in search queries indicates a notable acceleration in the AI search market. Perplexity has been able to go from processing 230 million monthly searches in August 2024 to 780 million in May 2025 thanks to this growth rate, indicating the platform’s growing popularity as consumers look for alternatives to conventional search engines.
“If we can maintain this growth rate, we’ll be doing like a billion queries a week in a year,” Srinivas stated. And it’s rather remarkable considering that on the first day of 2022, we processed 3,000 requests in a single day. It has grown astronomically since then, reaching 30 million requests each day at this point.
As evidenced by its agreement with Motorola to become a native assistant on Android smartphones, the company’s strategic push into hardware partnerships parallels its rapid increase in queries. When it came to competition, Srinivas was blunt, saying that “Google Assistant is a terrible experience, and they know it themselves,” and that Google has given Perplexity “an extremely hard time” when it comes to distribution agreements with OS manufacturers. Perplexity’s 6.2% market share in the fiercely competitive AI search space suggests that this aggressive expansion strategy is paying off.
Srinivas continued by saying that the same growth trajectory is achievable, particularly with the next Comet browser.
“It’s infinite retention if people are in the browser,” he stated. In addition to looking for new users who are simply fed up with outdated browsers like Chrome, everything in the search bar, everything on the new tab page, everything you’re doing on the sidecar, and whatever website you’re on will be subject to further inquiries per active user. That, in my opinion, is how we will develop in the upcoming year.
Perplexity is creating Comet, according to Srinivas, in order to change the function of AI from merely giving answers to doing tasks on your behalf. He clarified that an AI-powered response is basically the result of four or five searches combined. However, an AI activity would be completing a whole browsing session with a single prompt.
He stated that in order to achieve the most smooth possible hybridization of client and server side computation, it is imperative that you have a browser. “And that means rethinking the browser as a whole.”
He continued by explaining that Perplexity views Comet as a “cognitive operating system” rather than “yet another browser.”
“It will always be there for you, no matter what, whether it’s for work or life, as a backup system, or just going and browsing for you,” Srinivas stated. And I believe that will essentially force us to reconsider our very conception of the internet. For example, we used to browse the internet, but more and more individuals now live online. As if a large portion of our lives truly took place there. We need to completely reinvent the browser because if you want to create a proactive, tailored AI, it must coexist with you.
Although the company hasn’t disclosed many details about the browser, Srinivas stated in April that Perplexity is creating its own browser in part to track user activity outside of its own app in order to sell premium advertisements. This would essentially replicate what Google did covertly to grow into the behemoth it is today.
Although Srinivas previously stated on X that Comet would launch in the upcoming weeks, the precise launch date is still uncertain.
The Comet browser from Perplexity marks a significant change in the way AI engages with the web, going beyond information retrieval to do tasks on its own. Comet uses “agentic search” to complete complicated activities like flight booking, online purchase management, and form filling with little to no human involvement. It is built on top of Chromium for cross-platform interoperability. The browser’s advanced hybrid architecture automatically switches between modes according to network latency, model size requirements, and data sensitivity. For simple tasks, it uses lightweight neural networks for on-device processing, while for more complex operations, it uses cloud-based resources.
Comet’s technological innovation includes model caching, a privacy sandbox that handles sensitive inputs through separate Web Workers, and WebML API integration for hardware-accelerated operations. Because of this architecture, AI agents may easily connect with a variety of applications and get around platform limitations, especially on iOS. Comet intends to have more than 800 app integrations and establish a three-tiered data policy that puts user privacy first by requiring explicit consent for data-intensive operations, local-only processing for sensitive operations, and pseudonymous cloud interactions for non-sensitive tasks.
While privacy experts have voiced worries about the possibility of data harvesting despite Comet’s privacy promises, tech fans have praised the company’s creative approach to web navigation. Whether users would completely comprehend the ramifications of giving an AI browser such broad access to their digital lives has been questioned by some opponents.
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