What Perplexity and Comet do to your business today
In short
Perplexity answers questions with shopping results from PayPal merchants that it can check out in chat, and its Comet browser, free to everyone since 2 October 2025, runs an assistant that can act in any tab for the user. Comet acts inside the user's own session, so your site sees a person's browser rather than a labelled bot.
What it means for you
- If you take PayPal and your catalogue is synced, you can be found and paid inside Perplexity, with you as merchant of record.
- Comet's assistant works in the user's own browser, so it reaches you as that user's session, not through an integration. Bot rules that only target labelled agents will not see it.
- PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User are the names to check in your robots.txt and bot protection.
- A page an agent cannot read costs you the same here as anywhere: the answer is built without you.
What the evidence says
Tell a leader what Perplexity's shopping and its Comet browser can do on their site now.
- 4 Nov 2026
In the network's own crawl, run of 4 Nov 2026 (13,071 of 13,071 domains from Tranco list 746WX plus Ora leaderboard domains), 7.9 percent of sites with a readable robots.txt disallowed PerplexityBot and 5.9 percent disallowed Perplexity-User at the root.
- 8 Oct 2026
Ora's lab found (8 Oct 2026) that answers built without reading the site were 3.7 times as likely to miss every fact asked for (25 percent versus 7 percent).
- 26 Nov 2025
PayPal merchants can be discovered and paid inside Perplexity since November 2025, with the retailer as merchant of record.
- 26 Nov 2025
PayPal says its store sync makes catalogs discoverable in Perplexity and its agent ready service lets merchants accept payment using their existing PayPal setup.
- 2 Oct 2025
Perplexity made Comet available to everyone on 2 October 2025; its assistant can act in any new tab.
Related
- Which AI bots to let inFour kinds of visitor, four choices.
- AI agents and ecommerceDated examples and the asks for the web team.
- The self-checkEighteen questions scored in your browser.
Sources
- Scorecard methodology: the crawl of 4 Nov 2026 (amireadyforagents.com/scorecards/methodology), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Ora research: AX is the new AEO (8 Oct 2026) (ora.ai/blog/ax-is-the-new-aeo), read 4 Nov 2026. Vendor claim.
- PayPal: agentic shopping with Perplexity (Nov 2025) (newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2025-11-PayPal-Launches-Agentic-Shopping-with-Perplexity), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Perplexity: Comet available to everyone (2 Oct 2025) (perplexity.ai/hub/blog/comet-is-now-available-to-everyone-worldwide), read 4 Nov 2026.
- Sector scorecards dataset, edition 4 Nov 2026 (amireadyforagents.com/scorecards), read 4 Nov 2026.
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