Perplexity Launches Comet Plus Revenue Share for Publishers

Perplexity launches Comet Plus to pay publishers in the AI age

Perplexity AI announced Comet Plus, a new subscription tier that will share revenue with publishing partners whenever its AI draws on journalistic content. The move acknowledges a friction point in the industry: AI systems need human-produced content, and publishers say they deserve compensation when models or agents surface their work.

Comet Plus sits behind a $5-per-month paywall and will be offered free to Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers. Perplexity has set aside a $42.5 million partner fund and is actively recruiting publishers to join. The company frames this as a better business model for the AI era: reward quality information rather than rely on low-value scraping.

Why does this matter? Publishers have filed lawsuits against AI companies for using their work without payment or licensing. As generative AI becomes a primary research tool, the economics of who gets paid and how will shape both journalism and the reliability of AI answers. Perplexity’s program tries to convert that tension into a revenue stream.

Perplexity describes three compensation triggers. Think of them as three ways AI can "value" a publisher’s work:

• Human visits: when a user clicks through to a partner site after researching with Perplexity.
• Search citations: when Perplexity’s AI cites a publisher’s piece in an AI-generated summary.
• Agent actions: when Perplexity’s AI agent visits a publisher site to perform a task on a user’s behalf.

Perplexity is also testing Comet, an AI-powered web browser that summarizes sites and can act for users. When an AI agent autonomously browses and performs tasks, attribution becomes tougher — and that’s exactly where the industry needs clear rules and tracking to fairly compensate content creators.

There are practical challenges ahead. How do you attribute value when a summary pulls from multiple sources? How do you avoid gaming, accidental double-counting, or inflated agent traffic? Publishers will want transparency; AI firms will want scalable metrics. This is both a technical and contractual problem.

Perplexity’s $42.5M fund and explicit payout triggers are a notable industry signal: licensing and revenue share are emerging as the default path to settle disputes between publishers and AI companies. Expect more tailored licensing deals and measurement standards as other AI platforms respond.

For publishers this could restore some control and revenue; for AI firms it can shore up access to high-quality sources and reduce legal risk. For readers it raises a simple question: would you prefer AI that cites and pays sources, or AI that gives answers without accountability? The answer will shape where journalism and AI converge.

QuarkyByte’s approach would be to turn these challenges into measurable programs: build transparent attribution models, simulate per-citation economics, and design monitoring to catch abuse. Organizations — from publishers to regulators and platform owners — will need those capabilities to negotiate, implement, and audit fair revenue-sharing systems.

Perplexity’s Comet Plus is not the end of the conversation but an early template. As AI gets better at summarizing, citing, and acting, the industry will need robust measurement, clear contracts, and technical controls. That’s where well-designed attribution and transparent partner frameworks will determine whether publishers and AI platforms can coexist profitably.