Perplexity Reports Queries Growing 20% Month Over Month

Perplexity expects to keep growing at its current pace, with gains driven by its upcoming browser and consumers’ weariness with “legacy browsers” like Google’s Chrome, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said Thursday (June 5).

The artificial intelligence (AI) startup is handling 780 million queries per month, and that figure is growing over 20% month over month, Srinivas said during an interview conducted at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco and shared in a video by Bloomberg.

Perplexity recorded those figures in May, Srinivas said. If the company can sustain this growth rate, it will be doing a billion queries a week by this time next year, he added.

“We still think that same trajectory is possible even now, especially with all the kind of distribution partnerships we are trying to seek and the browser that we’re working on,” Srinivas said.

“If people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention, so everything on the search box, everything on the new tab page, everything you’re doing on the sidebar, any webpage you are in, these are all going to be extra queries per active user, as well as seeking new users who just are tired of legacy browsers like Chrome. I think that’s going to be the way to grow this over the coming year.”

Perplexity said in a Feb. 24 post on X that its browser, dubbed Comet, was “coming soon” and invited people to sign up for a waitlist.

Perplexity’s AI-powered search tool provides answers in the form of sentences with links to the websites from which it got the information, rather than delivering a list of links like other search engines.

In April, Perplexity said it partnered with Motorola in what is “one of our first and most comprehensive integrations with a mobile phone brand.”

The AI startup’s answer engine and assistant will be preinstalled on the new generation of Motorola smartphones worldwide.

It was reported Monday (June 2) that Samsung is close to unveiling a new deal with Perplexity that would see the South Korean company invest in the AI firm and integrate its app and assistant into Samsung devices.