• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 5, 2025

Perplexity search queries are rising more than 20% month-over-month, and in May the company served 780 million -- about 30 million per day, the company's founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas told Bloomberg at its Tech conference on Thursday.

Srinivas, who interned at his first job with Google DeepMind in 2019, estimates that by the end of the year the company will serve 1 billion search queries per week.

It’s been a climb to the top, competing with those dominating the AI search sector such as Google and OpenAI.

Perplexity’s browser -- Comet, announced in February -- has yet to launch, but Srinivas believes browsers are key for successful AI companies.

“Sundar became the CEO of Google because he focused on the Chrome project,” Srinivas said, suggesting that this helped Google compete against Microsoft, although it took 10 years to become one of the leading browsers.

Srinivas said most people use Google as a navigation tool, but when companies blend navigation, activities, and transactions using the browsing infrastructure, “you can go for it all in one tool.”

Moving from answers that are four or five searches in one, to actions that are entire browsing session in one prompt -- where the technology completes a task --  requires a browser, he said.

“I don’t think of Comet as another browser,” he said. “It will be a cognitive operating system.”

Srinivas believes that Comet will change how people think about the internet.

“If you want to build a proactive personal AI, it needs to live together with you,” he said. “That means rethinking the browser entirely.”

Perplexity in April announced a preinstall deal on Motorola phones, and nearing a deal to get the company’s AI engine on Samsung phones, potentially replacing Google Gemini.

The company also has struck enterprise deals with SAP for the enterprise, and revenue deals with publishers.

Perplexity introduced a publishers’ program in July 2024, and then expanded it in December.