Online journalism is under threat from low-quality AI summaries, but a new $5 subscription aims to change that by incentivizing publishers to participate. However, the success of this initiative depends on the cooperation of the publishers.
In a bid to offer high-quality content to its subscribers, Perplexity, an AI-driven platform, has unveiled a new subscription model called Comet Plus. The service aims to provide access to content from trusted publishers and journalists.
Perplexity's mission is to keep the content accessed by its subscribers at the highest level available on the web. To achieve this, the platform has partnered with esteemed publishers such as TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com, to name a few.
The new model comes with a $5 monthly subscription fee, 80% of which will be allocated to participating publishers. The remaining 20% will cover general computing costs for the AI.
Online journalism has traditionally been sustained by clicks, leading to revenue. However, AI-generated summaries, which can potentially prevent readers from clicking through to the source of the content, have raised concerns. This is particularly true when cited sources are missing.
To address these concerns, Perplexity distributes revenue to its partners based on three types of internet traffic: human visits, search citations, and agent actions. This ensures that publishers are fairly compensated for the use of their content.
The launch of Comet Plus follows a series of legal issues involving copyright and trademark infringements that Perplexity has faced in the past. Despite these challenges, Perplexity remains committed to its mission and has taken steps to rectify these issues.
In addition to the subscription model, Perplexity offers an AI-powered "Perplexity Assistant" and an "Answer Engine," as well as a standalone "Comet" AI browser. The platform has also been involved in various legal disputes, including a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by eight news publishers against Microsoft and OpenAI in May 2024.
Interestingly, Perplexity attempted to take advantage of Google's antitrust legal issues by offering $34.5 billion for Google's Chrome browser. However, the offer was declined.
As of now, there are no publicly available details on which publishers are currently joining the content agreement with Perplexity. Publishers will receive a monetary kickback any time their content is accessed by Perplexity AI.
The introduction of Comet Plus comes at a time when AI-generated summaries are becoming increasingly common. These bots, including Google's AI Overviews and OpenAI's ChatGPT, are actively crawling content and redirecting page views. However, it's important to note that AI-generated summaries can potentially report incorrect information due to errors or "hallucinations."
In July 2025, Cloudflare unveiled a "pay per crawl" plan that allows websites to charge AI crawlers for the content they scrape. This plan was endorsed by more than 37 major publishers, signalling a shift in the digital content landscape.
As Perplexity continues to evolve and navigate these challenges, it remains to be seen how the platform will shape the future of online journalism and content consumption.
