From paywall to #3 on the App Store
Perplexity spent over a year positioning Comet as a premium, enterprise-focused AI browser before dropping the paywall entirely in March 2026.
The reaction was immediate: the free version hit #3 overall on the US iOS App Store within 48 hours of launch — a level of pull usually reserved for major consumer apps, not a browser built around an in-page AI assistant, deep research mode, and agentic task automation.
A small share of a huge market
Chrome's market position isn't remotely threatened in raw numbers — it still holds around 66% of the browser market, an incumbency built over more than a decade. Comet's projected share, roughly 2.5%, sounds modest next to that.
But 2.5% of a market that size is still tens of millions of people using a browser that fundamentally works differently: it reads a page, understands its content, and can act on it directly, rather than just rendering it for a human to scroll through.
Why it matters for AEO
A browser that 'reads' pages the way an AI assistant does is effectively another retrieval pipeline your content has to be legible to — not just Googlebot, not just ChatGPT's own crawler, but the browser itself, mid-session.
The same clarity that helps AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite you is exactly what helps an agentic browser act on your content correctly.