Perplexity received 780 million questions in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared it on stage at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Srinivas said that AI search engines are seeing growth of over 20% per month.
“If we can maintain this growth rate, we'll give you a year and ask a billion questions per week,” Srinivas said. “And on the first day of 2022 we only did 3,000 queries for one day, so that's pretty impressive. From there to 30 million queries a day, it was incredible growth.”
Srinivas noted that the same growth trajectory is possible, especially in the new Comet browsers we are working on.
“If people are in the browser, that's endless retention,” he said. “Everything in the search bar, all the new tab pages, everything you do in the sidecar, all the pages you're in, these will all be an additional query for each active user. We're also looking for new users who are tired of legacy browsers like Chrome.
Srinivas said the reason the embarrassment is developing is to shift the role of AI from simply providing answers to actually complete the action on your behalf. He explained that getting an AI-powered answer is essentially four or five searches in one search. Meanwhile, the AI that performs the action will complete the entire browsing session at one prompt.
“You actually have a browser and you need to hybridize client-server side calculations in the most seamless way possible,” he said. “And that requires a whole browser rethinking.”
He went on to explain that confusion does not consider comets as “a further browser,” but rather as “a cognitive operating system.”
“Anytime, anytime, just browsing sessions for work, life, or for you, and it's always there for you,” Srinivas said. “And I think it makes us even think about the Internet fundamentally. We started browsing the Internet before, but now people are living more and more on the Internet. A lot of our lives actually exist there.
The company hasn't revealed much about the browser, but Srinivas said in April that one of the reasons the baffling is developing its own browser is that it allows it to track user activity beyond its own apps to sell premium ads.
It is currently unknown if Comet will be released exactly, but Srinivas has previously said it will be released in the coming weeks on X.
Comet has native virtuals that meet recording, transcription, and search. It's not part of the first release, but it's a very fast follow-up. The release date will take 3 weeks and up to 5 weeks. Reliability and latency improved…
– AravindSrinivas (@aravsrinivas) May 13, 2025