Perplexity AI: Search, Chatbot, Comet and Opt-Out
Perplexity answers questions with links to the pages it used. Its search, chatbot, Comet browser, publisher payments, APIs and site opt-out.
Perplexity is an AI search engine and chat assistant from Perplexity AI. It answers questions in plain text and links to the web pages it used. The company also makes the Comet web browser and sells search and answer APIs to developers. If you want Perplexity to cite your site, its search crawler, PerplexityBot, must be able to reach your pages.
What Perplexity offers
| Product | What it does |
|---|---|
| Perplexity search and chat | Answers a question in a chat and links to each page that it used |
| Comet | A web browser with Perplexity as the default search engine and an assistant in a sidebar |
| Comet Plus | A $5 monthly subscription that shares revenue with publishers |
| Developer APIs | Ranked web results and cited answers for other apps |
How Perplexity finds and cites pages
Perplexity search and the chat assistant use the same sources and the same user agents. A crawler builds the search index that answers draw from. When a person asks a question, Perplexity can also open a page in real time to answer it. The answer then shows a link to each page that Perplexity used.
The Comet browser
Perplexity announced Comet on July 9, 2025. At first, Comet was only for Perplexity Max subscribers, at $200 per month. On October 2, 2025, Comet became free for everyone worldwide, as Engadget reported.
Comet uses Perplexity as its default search engine. A sidebar assistant answers questions and sums up text. It can also do some tasks, for example draft an email.
Payments to publishers
Comet Plus costs $5 per month. It is free for existing Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers, as Press Gazette reports. Perplexity said that 80% of Comet Plus revenue goes to participating publishers. Each publisher gets a share based on human visits, search citations and agent actions.
Developer APIs
The Perplexity API documentation lists an Agent API that gives “web-grounded answers with built-in citations in one call”. It also lists a Search API that returns ranked web results. Each result has a title, a URL, extracted text and a date. Developers show these results in their own apps, so text from your pages can appear outside Perplexity.
Which bots to allow or block
Perplexity documents two user agents:
| User agent | Job | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | Builds the search index | Obeys it |
| Perplexity-User | Opens a page when a user asks a question | Generally ignores it |
To stay out of Perplexity search results, disallow PerplexityBot in robots.txt. That rule does not stop Perplexity-User. Perplexity says that neither agent collects content to train AI foundation models.
In August 2025, Cloudflare reported that Perplexity used undeclared user agents after sites blocked its declared bots. Perplexity disputed the report. The Perplexity-User guide gives the details.