Why Perplexity’s agent payments only solve part of the problem

Many creators resent when their work is used to develop AI tools without compensation or attribution. While big-name publishers have been able to secure bespoke licensing deals, creators without legal teams and institutional clout have been left feeling marginalized. However, efforts to secure a fair deal for publishers have been gathering steam. 

In this post, we’ll look at Perplexity’s Comet Plus program which aims to provide its users with access to high-quality journalism while also ensuring that the creators behind this content are compensated for their efforts.

Comet Plus shares 80% of subscription revenue with publishers

Perplexity announced Comet Plus in August 2025 as a companion to its Comet browser. The subscription costs $5 a month on its own but is included in some of Perplexity’s plans. Revenue from those subscriptions is pooled. Perplexity keeps 20 percent, and the remaining 80 percent goes to publishers participating in the program. The company said it was starting with a pool of $42.5 million. The launch roster announced that fall included names such as CNN, Condé Nast, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde and Le Figaro.

What sets the program apart is how it divides that money. Payments are based on three kinds of traffic: Human visits to a publisher's site through Comet, citations of the publisher's content in Perplexity's answers, and agent actions. This is where Comet's assistant uses a publisher's content to complete a task for a user. As Perplexity's head of publisher partnerships noted to Digiday, although people increasingly rely on agents to decide what to purchase, publishers rarely see revenue from that kind of indirect engagement.

Comet Plus is the first program to pay for AI agent actions

The most important thing about Comet Plus is that it names agent actions as a separate category of use. That is more than a technicality. Much of the industry's discussion of AI compensation has assumed that the click is the basic unit of value, but agents are changing the equation. An agent that reads ten reviews and recommends one product has still used ten publishers' work. However, none of them may receive a visit.

By counting agent actions as their own event, Perplexity is acknowledging that this use has value whether or not a human ever arrives on the page.

Comet Plus also ties payment to actual use rather than to a flat annual fee. While flat-fee licensing offers predictability, it doesn’t reflect how much a publisher’s content is actually being used within a product. On the other hand, a usage-based model, at least in principle, rewards the content that agents and readers rely on most. 

Comet Plus creates an important precedent. Previously, a publisher asking an AI company to pay for agent use had no example to point to. Now that there is one, it will be easier for publishers to put the question on the table.

Comet Plus covers only Perplexity and discloses little about payouts

Publishers need to approach Perplexity with clear eyes since the program has real limitations. Here are some things to consider:

• Comet Plus only covers Perplexity’s products. Many agents are built by companies with far larger user bases than Perplexity, and unless those companies adopt something similar, the share of total agent traffic that generates a payment through Comet Plus will remain small.
• The money depends on subscriptions. The pool grows only as Comet Plus grows, and Perplexity has not said how many paying subscribers are funding it. The $42.5 million figure is a starting commitment.
• The economics are largely undisclosed. Perplexity has not published what an agent action is worth relative to a visit or a citation, how the three categories are weighted, or what individual publishers have been paid. Without that information, a publisher may struggle to make a truly informed decision.
• Measurement belongs to the platform. Perplexity decides what counts as an agent action. Publishers have no independent way to verify those numbers which can make it hard for them to know if they’re getting a good deal.

Publishers should treat Comet Plus as a starting point, not a settlement

Despite these limitations, publishers shouldn’t dismiss Comet Plus out of hand. Early compensation models always have growing pains, and this one is at least moving the discussion in a useful direction.

But publishers should treat it as a starting point rather than the ultimate solution.

The broader question is whether agent compensation becomes a standard feature of AI licensing or remains one company's experiment. That will depend on whether other platforms follow Perplexity’s lead. 

Whether or not agent compensation becomes standard, publishers need a way to get their content licensed on fair terms now. Newstex helps publishers of all sizes reach AI developers and content buyers through a single licensing relationship. Interested in licensing your content through us? Apply here.

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