Most AI licensing deals pay publishers once, for access. Comet Plus pays per use: publishers earn when people visit their pages from Perplexity, when Perplexity cites them in an answer, and when Perplexity's agent reads them to complete a task. It is the first large payout model that counts agent activity as a separate revenue line, which is why it matters beyond Perplexity.
The Model
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Price | $5 a month standalone, included in Perplexity Pro and Max |
| Publisher share | 80% of Comet Plus revenue goes to participating publishers, Perplexity keeps 20% |
| Initial pool | $42.5 million committed by Perplexity |
| Payout basis | Three kinds of traffic: human visits, search citations, and agent actions |
| Announced | Late August 2025. Launch partners were named in September and October 2025, with the program formalized as the main publisher model into 2026 |
Who Is In
Named partners include Condé Nast (The New Yorker, Wired, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Ars Technica and others), CNN, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Le Monde and Le Figaro. Partners from Perplexity's earlier ad-share Publishers' Program include TIME, Der Spiegel, The Independent, Gannett (USA TODAY and 200+ local titles), The Texas Tribune and Lee Enterprises. Perplexity hasn't published a total partner count, and third-party totals differ, so none is given here.
What Is Not Public
Perplexity hasn't disclosed actual payouts, the weighting between visits, citations and agent actions, or how many paying subscribers fund the pool. Analyst estimates of per-citation earnings are circulating, but none comes from Perplexity, so this page doesn't repeat them. Anyone modelling Comet Plus revenue should treat it as unknown until a partner discloses it.
The Litigation Around It
Comet Plus launched while Perplexity faced suits from News Corp's Dow Jones and the New York Post, The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, and others. Condé Nast, which sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in 2024, later appears as a launch partner. That suggests the program works partly as a settlement template. Amazon's separate case against the Comet browser agent went the other way: the Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's injunction on August 4, 2026. See Amazon Buy for Me for that ruling.
How It Compares
| Model | Pays for | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Flat licence | Access to an archive, usually yearly | OpenAI and Google news licensing deals |
| Per crawl | Each fetch | Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl, TollBit |
| Per use | Citation, visit or agent action | Comet Plus, and Cloudflare's Pay Per Use pilots |
The industry is moving toward per-use payment. Cloudflare's September 2026 changes point the same way (see Cloudflare's new AI bot defaults).
Brand Visibility Implications
When publishers earn per citation, they have a direct reason to be cited, and to make their coverage easy for Perplexity to find, parse and quote. The partner outlets above are likely to show up more in Perplexity answers over time. Brands trying to appear in Perplexity should find out which of those outlets cover their category and get into their coverage, since that coverage is what Perplexity cites. See Perplexity citation patterns and how to get cited by Perplexity.
Methodology
Figures on this page are drawn from primary announcements and documentation wherever they exist, with established trade and legal press used only to corroborate or to fill gaps a primary source leaves open. Sources: Perplexity: Introducing Comet Plus, Perplexity: launch partners, Press Gazette, Digiday. Where outlets disagree on a date or number, the page gives the range or names the disagreement rather than choosing one. Status as of September 2026; this area changes monthly, so re-check before quoting.
How Presenc AI Helps
Presenc AI records which sources Perplexity cites when it answers questions in your category, so you can see whether Comet Plus partner outlets are gaining share of citations, and which of them to approach.