Perplexity received 780 million queries in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared on stage at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI search engine is seeing more than 20% growth month-over-month.
“Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate,” Srinivas said. “And that’s pretty impressive because the first day in 2022, we did 3,000 queries, just one single day. So from there to doing 30 million queries a day now, it’s been phenomenal growth.”
Srinivas went on to note that the same growth trajectory is possible, especially with the new Comet browser that it’s working on.
“If people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention,” he 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.”
Srinivas said the reason Perplexity is developing Comet is to shift the role of AI from simply providing answers to actually completing actions on your behalf. He explained that when you get an AI-powered answer, it’s essentially four or five searches in one. On the other hand, AI performing an action would be getting an entire browsing session done with one prompt.
“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.”
He went on to explain that Perplexity isn’t thinking of Comet as “yet another browser,” but as a “cognitive operating system.”
“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.”
While the company hasn’t revealed too much about the browser, Srinivas said in April that one reason Perplexity is developing its own browser is to track user activity beyond its own app so that it can sell premium ads, which would essentially mirror what Google quietly did to become the giant it is today.
It’s currently unknown when exactly Comet will launch, but Srinivas previously said on X that it will launch in the coming weeks.
