This weekend, I got early access to Perplexity’s new LLM-driven browser, Comet. Here are 5 of my takeaways for SEOs + the future of AI browsers.

So as we know, LLMs such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are working on creating their own browsers. This is potential threat to traditional Google search as these browsers will use an experience that’s driven by the LLM as opposed to built on top of search like Chrome currently is.

Well as it turns out I was given early access to Comet over the weekend and had some time to play around with it’s new browser. The goal is to give us some insights into how other LLM browsers might look and how Google might integrate these features into Chrome.

1. Interface:

The current interface is EXTREMELY similar to the web interface of Perplexity. The only difference I could tell was that in Comet, for a given prompt, there will be three “blue links” at the top of the result.

Then below it is the same LLM answer you would get. Other than that, the tabs and general experience are all exactly the same.

2. Browsing History Integration:

Probably one of the biggest benefits of an LLM browser is that it can run on top of your previous browsing history. Instead of just chat history, Comet now has access to any page I’ve ever looked at.

Then I can ask it questions like “Of the shoes I’ve looked at, which one do you recommend” and it will give an answer. This creates an era of personalized content.

3. LLM-Based Ecosystem:

As we thought, the entire ecosystem is structured around Perplexity, not Google search. Opening up a new tab and typing something in will result in a new prompt in Perplexity, not a Google search. This will result in longer queries/prompts as users learn they can ask deeper questions over time.

4. AI Assistant:

Comet also has an “Assistant” button that you can run on any page. This allows you to run Perplexity on top of any page you want. There’s a built in “Summarize” button that will provide a high level summary of the content.

As well, you could ask the AI assistant any question you want about the page and it can answer it. So now you need to think about what types of questions users would ask about the content and make sure it’s easily structured in your content.

5. Potential Google Competition:

As of now, I don’t think the experience is different enough that would shift users away from Chrome. With Gemini, Google has the ability to replicate all of these features. Given their strong user base with Chrome, I find it hard to believe they couldn’t easily push the same features into their own browser.