Perplexity Updates: Comet, Publisher Deals and the Legal Docket

Perplexity confirmed, first to the Financial Times and then reported by Search Engine Land and MacRumors, that it has discontinued advertising with "no plans to bring them back".

A Perplexity executive framed the reversal around trust: "A user needs to believe this is the best possible answer." And: "We are in the accuracy business, and the business is giving the truth, the right answers."

The arc it closes ran fifteen months: sponsored follow-up questions launched in November 2024 with Indeed and Whole Foods, and in April 2025 CEO Aravind Srinivas had said the Comet browser would help the company "get data even outside the app to better understand you" for hyper-personalized ads.

One open question the shutdown leaves, which we have not been able to resolve from any source: the 2024 publisher program shared AD revenue with its partner outlets, so what its payouts look like with no ads to share is unverified. The publisher economics section tracks what is known.

The New York Times filed on 5th December, per TechCrunch, with the Chicago Tribune having filed the day before. Both aim at retrieval-augmented generation rather than model training.

The Times' framing, from its filing: "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time", with outputs "often verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions".

Its corrected complaint, filed February 2026, recites DMCA takedowns, an October 2024 cease-and-desist and technical blocks Perplexity allegedly evaded, and pleads direct, derivative-work and contributory counts.

Perplexity's Jesse Dwyer, to TechCrunch: "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years...Fortunately it's never worked."

The Tribune's suit adds a Comet angle, alleging the browser circumvents its paywall. Two days earlier, Italy's RTI and Medusa Film had filed the first Italian AI suit, in Rome, aimed at TRAINING rather than retrieval, which makes that week the docket's densest.

Amazon opened the agentic-access front on 4th November: a cease-and-desist demanding Comet's agent stop shopping on Amazon without identifying itself, and a same-day lawsuit in the Northern District of California under the CFAA and California's computer-access law, with a simultaneous preliminary-injunction motion, per TechCrunch.

Perplexity answered in a blog post titled "Bullying is not innovation", arguing that agents acting on human direction carry the user's permissions and need not self-identify.

That one disagreement, whether an agent is its user or a bot, is the case's whole substance, and it split the courts: the district court granted Amazon an injunction in March, and the Ninth Circuit vacated it in August, siding with the user-access reading for now.

This is a computer-access case, not a copyright one, which is why it matters to every agentic product and not only to answer engines.

Reddit filed against Perplexity AND its alleged suppliers, SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy, in the Southern District of New York, with claims led by DMCA circumvention, per the SDNY Blog's case note.

The theory is distinctive: rather than scraping Reddit directly, the defendants allegedly scraped Reddit content out of Google's search results, bypassing Reddit's own access controls. Reddit calls it data laundering.

Two allegations give it teeth. A honeypot post visible only to Google's crawler surfaced in Perplexity answers within hours. And after a cease-and-desist, Reddit says Perplexity's Reddit citations rose "roughly forty-fold", per Search Engine Journal's account of the complaint.

Perplexity posted its response on Reddit itself: "We won't be extorted, and we won't help Reddit extort Google."

The suit produced this docket's first major ruling in July 2026, when the circumvention claims survived dismissal.

Comet went free for everyone on 2nd October after three months as a Max-subscriber exclusive with, Perplexity said, "millions" on the waitlist, per TechCrunch. Max users got a new background assistant that runs parallel tasks with a progress dashboard.

The publisher half of the launch: Press Gazette named the Comet Plus launch partners as CNN, Conde Nast, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde and Le Figaro, with Conde Nast contributing paywalled New Yorker, Wired, Architectural Digest and Vanity Fair content.

Comet Plus was positioned as an AI-enhanced alternative to Apple News: 5 dollars a month standalone, included with Pro and Max, with 80% of its revenue promised to publishers.

A dating note for that roster: CNN sued Perplexity in May 2026 after a compensation arrangement dissolved, and Perplexity has not published a current partner list we can verify, so treat the seven names as the launch roster, not today's.

Comet Plus arrived as a 5-dollar-a-month subscription with a publisher split Engadget stated plainly: "Publishers will get 80 percent of the revenue of Comet Plus, according to Perplexity, with the remaining 20 percent allocated to 'compute.'" An initial pool of 42.5 million dollars seeds the payouts and grows with subscriptions.

The design novelty is what gets compensated: three traffic types, human visits, search citations and agent actions, per Search Engine Journal. Paying for agent actions prices the exact behavior publishers complain about, an AI reading a page so a human does not have to.

It joined, rather than replaced, the 2024 publisher program, which shared ad revenue with a different partner set. The two ran in parallel, and what the older program pays now that the ads it shared are gone is an open question we track in the publisher economics section.