In this follow-up to my first Comet browser review, I take a deeper dive into how Perplexity AI’s new browser actually works — from the features it offers to the privacy and data questions it raises.
We explore:
- How Comet’s structure and built-in AI tools differ from a standard browser
- Real examples of how it summarizes websites, cites sources, and uses services like TLDR
- Why I’m still hesitant to sign in with Google or Apple
- How Comet might change SEO and content optimization at a page-by-page level
- Whether bias, accessibility, and e-commerce integrations (Amazon? Honey? Groupon?) will shape the way it delivers information
- The subtle ways AI browsers may steer how we discover, navigate, and purchase online
- As AI-native browsers emerge, the question isn’t just “Is it useful?” — it’s “Who controls the data, and how will that change the web?”
#AI #CometBrowser #PerplexityAI #TechReview #DataPrivacy #ArtificialIntelligence #SEO
Video Transcript:
We wanted to make a follow-up video from our last one about Perplexity’s new dedicated browser called Comet. We are in the process of exploring it. I think they’re doing a similar model to what Gmail did years ago where they gave limited access and you could apply for an invitation to test it out. We are one of the lucky ones, I guess.
We wanted to share some of the things that we were seeing, some of the things we were learning—not so much as a “hey cool look at this tool” but using this to talk about some of the really interesting issues surrounding AI and how it’s going to affect things. We believe, and we’ve been diving in for the last 6 months, into vetting AI tool after AI tool on the consumer side of things—how it’s helping vendors, how it’s helping businesses—just diving in ourselves, testing a lot of these things, talking to owners of some of these companies and learning quite a lot. It’s been a really interesting journey.
There’s no denying that the landscape of the world is changing because of this. That’s an understatement and super obvious. I do think there are conversations that need to be had, if no more than just self-reflection. We did get this invitation, downloaded it, and we’re in the middle of exploring it. What I want to do for this video is give you more of an overview of the structure of it, of the things we’ve noticed so far, and some of the tools.
First of all, we found this article—I think they served it up to me and I don’t remember why I clicked on it—but it has an interesting take on how useful it is versus Google and such. Definitely worth checking out. Structurally, you can see what you’d expect for the file menu, but they have these extra pieces over here.
You can learn about the site settings. You have all the different options. You can bookmark it. You can get the link. Instead of having to copy this manually, you can just do a quick copy of the link. I actually have not—oh, that’s the zoom. I was going to say I have not done that till just now. What I was going to show you is this right here. This refreshes the summary.
I think this is why I clicked on this actually. Perplexity always does this and I think you’ll see ChatGPT and Grock do similar things with their articles. A lot of this is just the Perplexity summary based on articles they found. True to their format, they hyperlink and do citations for what they’ve found. Looks like they only have the one here they’re showing.
What’s interesting is they have that there and you can close it if you want. It just goes back to normal. I usually just click on this to get it back and then it starts over. I’ll show you from a few different companies—our own and then some others—how it treats different sites.
When you go to a new tab, you get this as the opening. They want me to sign in with Google or Apple, but I’m not. If you watch the last video, you’ll see why. Not ready to do that yet. You get this kind of blank piece here. If I click it, it gives you a basic view. This link right here is where they want you to use your Perplexity account.
They want you to get in there because that’s where you’re actually logging in. We could log in and we have not yet decided if we’re going to do that. What I do want to show you is how it works. This is our current website. It pulls it up the way you’d expect. We still get this message here because we’re not logged in, but it looks like one of the things they leverage quite a lot is the TLDDR site.
If I click on this, it’ll open it up. I don’t know if you guys have used the site before. This is new to me. That’s one of the things I really like about some of these AI tools—not only am I learning new tools, but I’m discovering new sites and resources. TLDDR, if you know, you know. It was interesting for me to see, based on these 11 sources they provided.
We’re down at the very bottom. That’s interesting. Talking about what we do—we do online courses, but we’ve actually temporarily, just in the last 6 months, halted those because we believe the landscape is changing so quickly that what we were teaching was becoming frequently outdated. To serve you better, we’re focusing on exposure while the ground is shifting beneath us, helping us stay on top of it.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the video of an avalanche where there’s a rabbit or something jumping all across it, but I feel like that’s what we have to do right now as the earth is shifting under us. It’s interesting to see what they think we do, what we don’t. I don’t hate the summary. It’s kind of cool. It talks about—I think it pulls in reviews. I don’t know if it got this from our Google business listing or some of the reviews we’ve put on the site.
It cites us here, which is very interesting. It’ll be interesting to see “view sources and report” because that just goes over here, which is kind of funny. The steps talk about the process it went through to get that answer. I don’t know what this does here. That’s interesting. And then “share link.”
You could obviously just do this yourself by putting it into Perplexity or ChatGPT. Perplexity seems to be the most effective and they were first at being able to put a URL in and have it actually pull content from it. I remember trying that with ChatGPT initially and it was like, “We can’t do that.” That was a while back and I think Perplexity came in and did things others weren’t, and Grock and ChatGPT caught up quickly.
