Perplexity Statistics September 2026: Users, Revenue, Comet & Market Share

For the broader context behind these numbers — including the regulatory and product news that shaped the month — see our recap of AI search news for June 2026.

Key takeaways

Perplexity has approximately 45 million monthly active users, more than double the 22 million it had at the start of 2025, and around 170–179 million monthly website visitors — unchanged since June, with no newer figure disclosed.
Perplexity now processes over 1 billion monthly search queries, up from 780 million reported by CEO Aravind Srinivas in mid-2025 and just 3,000 queries a day at its 2022 launch.
Growth and market share are moving in opposite directions — and the gap is widening. Users, queries, and revenue are all up — but Perplexity's share of AI chatbot referral traffic kept sliding, down to 4.31% in August 2026 from 5.88% in July and 7.73% in April, as Google Gemini pulled further ahead.
Revenue has roughly tripled since March, and a new funding round could value Perplexity above $30 billion. Annualised revenue climbed past $750 million by August 2026, up from $450 million in March and under $250 million at the start of the year, per Reuters. Nvidia was separately reported in talks to invest as part of a round that would value the company above $30 billion — up more than 50% from the $20 billion it was valued at a year earlier — though as of this writing the round has not been confirmed closed.
Perplexity keeps betting on distribution beyond chat: Comet browser's monthly active users grew well into the double-digit millions through Q1 2026 (no newer public figure has surfaced since), it powers Bixby on Samsung's Galaxy S26, and — new since June — Perplexity Computer is now integrated directly inside Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams).
Revenue has climbed steadily all year — from $100M ARR (March 2025) to $200M (September 2025) to $450M (March 2026) to $750M+ (August 2026) — while the company also fights active copyright lawsuits from News Corp and Encyclopaedia Britannica over how it sources content; the Britannica case remains in active discovery, with document production and a magistrate conference both scheduled for late September 2026 and no ruling yet.
CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on June 9, 2026 that Perplexity will IPO in 2028 "regardless of what happens to Anthropic or OpenAI" — a notably fixed timeline given both rivals are already racing toward public or near-public valuations north of $850 billion.

Perplexity positions itself as an AI-first answer engine rather than a general chatbot, competing most directly with Google AI Overviews (full stats) and ChatGPT for research-heavy, citation-heavy queries. It's also the product most brands ask us about after ChatGPT, since ranking in Perplexity depends heavily on which sources it decides to cite. The numbers still show a company growing fast in absolute terms — more users, more queries, revenue nearly tripling since spring — while steadily losing relative ground to Gemini and Claude on referral share, which is pushing Perplexity to diversify into a browser, an enterprise/Microsoft 365 integration, and an assistant layer rather than compete on chat alone.

Here is a full breakdown of the numbers as of September 2026.

How many people use Perplexity?

Perplexity has approximately 45 million monthly active users, more than doubling from 22 million at the start of 2025. The platform draws roughly 170–179 million monthly website visitors globally, with an estimated 2 million daily active users on the core site.

Query volume has scaled even faster than the user base. Perplexity went from 3,000 queries a day at its 2022 launch to roughly 30 million daily queries by 2025, and now processes over 1 billion monthly search queries as of mid-2026 — up from the 780 million a month CEO Aravind Srinivas disclosed in mid-2025, itself a 20% month-over-month growth rate at the time.

Engagement looks healthy by the metrics Perplexity controls directly: 85–90% of users return within 30 days of their first visit, sessions average 4–12 minutes depending on the measurement source, and Perplexity holds #3 on Cloudflare's daily AI traffic rankings, behind only ChatGPT and Claude. The company also claims 97% citation accuracy on its answers — a self-reported figure worth treating as directional rather than independently audited.

The 45 million figure refers to the core answer engine. A broader estimate from Sacra's April 2026 analysis puts usage at over 100 million monthly active users across all Perplexity products combined — web, Comet browser, mobile apps, and Sonar API-embedded usage. As with similar "all-surfaces" figures reported by other AI companies, this isn't directly comparable to the narrower 45 million core-product number. Neither figure has been updated since June, and no newer official disclosure has surfaced as of September 2026.

How people use Perplexity

Per the most recent available breakdown (based on a Cornell University usage study that remains the best public data as of June 2026), Perplexity usage splits roughly 55% personal, 30% professional, and 15% educational. By topic, Productivity and Workflow queries make up just over a third of all searches — the single largest category, ahead of general research, shopping, and coding.

Subscription plans and pricing

Perplexity's tier structure has expanded well past the original free/Pro split:

Free — no cost, limited daily Pro Searches
Pro — $20/month, unlimited Pro Searches and model switching across GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Perplexity's own Sonar models
Max — $200/month, adds Perplexity Computer (a multi-model orchestration/agentic tool) and higher usage limits for power users
Enterprise Pro — $40/seat/month, built for teams needing collaboration, security, and admin controls
Enterprise Max — $325/seat/month, for research-intensive organizations wanting maximum model performance

Perplexity's audience skews toward high-value users even on the free tier: per WARC-cited research, roughly 80% of its audience are college graduates, 30% are senior company leaders, and 65% are high-income white-collar professionals — a demographic profile that shaped the company's decision to launch advertising rather than rely solely on subscriptions.

Revenue and valuation

Perplexity's funding trajectory has been one of the steepest in the AI industry: a $3.1 million seed round in 2022 grew into a $150 million valuation by March 2023, $1 billion by March 2024, $9 billion by December 2024, $18 billion by mid-2025, and $20 billion following a September 2025 round (some trackers cite a slightly higher $22.6 billion figure for a subsequent close that reportedly included an undisclosed angel check from Cristiano Ronaldo). That $20 billion figure held through most of 2026 — until late August, when Reuters reported Nvidia was in talks to invest in a new round that would value Perplexity above $30 billion, more than 50% higher than the prior round. As of this writing that round has not been confirmed as closed, so treat $30 billion+ as a reported target rather than a locked-in figure.

Revenue has scaled dramatically faster than the funding rounds themselves this year:

Date	Annualized recurring revenue
March 2025	$100 million
September 2025	$200 million
Start of 2026	under $250 million
March 2026	$450 million
August 2026	$750 million+

Source: Reuters, citing The Information, August 23, 2026. Against the $20 billion valuation still in force for most of this growth, that ~$750 million ARR implies a roughly 27x revenue multiple — down further from the 35–50x implied back in March and the 100x+ implied by the September 2025 round. If the reported $30 billion+ round closes, the multiple would land closer to 40x again, since the new valuation and the new revenue figure both landed around the same time. That compression-then-partial-rebound pattern is typical of the broader 2026 AI market: investors are still paying a premium for growth, but the premium now moves with actual revenue rather than running far ahead of it.

Despite both larger rivals racing toward IPOs or near-$1-trillion private valuations, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on June 9, 2026 that the company still plans to go public in 2028 — a fixed timeline he said would hold "regardless of what happens to Anthropic or OpenAI," adding that the SpaceX IPO would be "a leading indicator" for how the market receives Anthropic's and OpenAI's own expected listings. Nothing in the reported Nvidia talks suggests that timeline has changed.

Company and team

Perplexity's headcount has grown roughly 4x since 2023, though estimates vary by source and methodology: workforce-analytics firm Revelio Labs puts it at 964 employees as of Q1 2026, up from 250 in 2023, while other trackers (LeadIQ) estimate closer to 1,500 employees by May 2026 across six continents. Finance/operations and engineering are the largest functions by headcount, and Serbia is currently its fastest-growing location, up 55.6% year over year.

Beyond chat: Comet, Samsung, and advertising

With chatbot market share getting harder to defend, Perplexity's most consequential 2026 moves have been about distribution rather than the core answer engine:

Comet, Perplexity's AI browser, went free globally on October 2, 2025 and grew from roughly 3 million monthly active users early in Q1 2026 to an estimated 18 million by the end of that quarter, per third-party trackers (Perplexity itself has not published an updated official figure). Its iOS app hit #3 on the US App Store within 48 hours of launching on March 18, 2026. Head-to-head user testing generally rates Comet's agent mode as faster than ChatGPT's Atlas browser, with the two (plus The Browser Company's Dia) now treated as the three main entrants in the emerging "AI browser" category.
Perplexity became the first non-Google company to get OS-level assistant access on a Samsung flagship: its API now powers Bixby's real-time answers on the Galaxy S26, and users can set the Perplexity Assistant as their phone's default digital assistant.
New since June: Perplexity Computer is now built directly into Microsoft 365 — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams — giving Perplexity its first major enterprise productivity-suite distribution deal alongside the Samsung and Comet pushes.
Perplexity Shopping lets users complete purchases without leaving the platform via "Buy with Pro" one-click checkout — free for merchants (no commission, no listing fees) and free shipping for Pro subscribers, funded by Perplexity. Shopping-related queries grew 5x within months of launch, and Adobe Analytics found AI-driven shopping traffic to US retail sites grew 693% during the 2025 holiday season. Merchants report Perplexity-referred shoppers convert at a roughly 57% higher average order value than other AI-platform referral traffic.
Perplexity launched an advertising and publisher revenue-share program, paying media companies out of a $42.5 million pool when their articles are used to answer queries. The Publisher Program has grown to 2,400+ participating publishers, including CNN, Condé Nast, Fortune, The Washington Post, and Le Monde. A subscription news product, Comet Plus, is rolling out more broadly in fall 2026 with an 80/20 revenue split favoring publishers.
Sonar, Perplexity's developer API for real-time web search and citation, launched in early 2025 and is priced around $1 per million tokens for both input and output — positioning it as an infrastructure play for other companies wanting to add live, cited search to their own products.

Legal challenges

Perplexity's content-sourcing model has drawn multiple copyright lawsuits. News Corp's Dow Jones and New York Post sued in October 2024 over alleged misuse of their articles. Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster followed in September 2025, alleging Perplexity scraped and reproduced their content — often verbatim — without permission, seeking damages and an injunction. Britannica filed an amended complaint on March 17, 2026, and Perplexity moved to dismiss; the case has since moved into active discovery rather than being resolved on the motion — the docket shows plaintiffs' data production and Perplexity's document production both due by September 3, 2026, a redaction request due September 21, and a telephone conference before the magistrate judge set for September 29, 2026. No ruling on the merits has been issued.

Who uses Perplexity? Demographics

Perplexity's user base skews young, educated, and slightly male.

Age group	Share of users
18–24	17.83%
25–34	29.46%
35–44	20.2%
45–54	15.66%
55–64	10.65%
65+	6.2%

Source: DemandSage / Similarweb, 2026.

By gender, 60.19% of Perplexity's visitors are male and 39.81% are female — a narrower gap than many emerging AI products. Among Gen Z specifically, surveys put Perplexity ahead of Gemini and Claude as the #1 trusted AI tool for research.

Where are Perplexity's users?

Country	Share of Perplexity traffic
United States	20.09%
India	11.01%
Germany	5.36%
Russia	4.65%
France	4.25%
Others	54.64%

Source: DemandSage / Similarweb, 2026. Other trackers show similar rankings with India closer to the US (some put India at 19–23% and the US at 15–18%), reflecting normal variance between third-party panels rather than a real shift in Perplexity's geography.

How Perplexity compares to the competition

Perplexity's competitive position depends heavily on which traffic measure you use — and the three most-cited ones tell noticeably different stories. For the equivalent breakdown on the market leader, see our ChatGPT stats.

Statcounter: chatbot referral share (renewed decline)

Statcounter tracks how often each chatbot refers clicks out to other websites. On this measure, Perplexity's steep early slide had leveled off by spring — but has now resumed for three straight months as Gemini pulls further ahead:

Period	Perplexity referral share
April 2025 (peak)	12.07%
January 2026	7.87%
March 2026	7.07%
April 2026	7.73%
July 2026	5.88%
August 2026	4.31%

Source: Statcounter Global Stats, August 2026 (compared against the July 2026 figure reported previously). Perplexity is now down more than 64% from its April 2025 peak. Gemini has overtaken it even more decisively for second place behind ChatGPT — in August 2026, Gemini held 10.9% against Perplexity's 4.31%, a gap that has more than doubled since April. Notably, Perplexity's decline hasn't benefited Claude either: Claude's own referral share fell to 2.57% in August, so Gemini is the only platform gaining share at everyone else's expense.

Similarweb: worldwide web-visit share (gradual decline)

Platform	Feb 2025	May 2026
ChatGPT	76.5%	53.9%
Google Gemini	5.6%	27.9%
Claude	1.4%	9.2%
DeepSeek	12.1%	4.1%
Perplexity	2.2%	1.3%

Source: Similarweb data via Momentic, June 2026. On raw web-visit share, Perplexity has been squeezed from both directions: it never had Gemini or Claude's scale, and even DeepSeek — despite its own steep decline — still generates more direct traffic worldwide.

Apptopia: US mobile app share (the sharpest decline)

The starkest number comes from mobile. Apptopia's US daily-active-user share data, cited widely in June 2026 roundups, shows Perplexity's app engagement collapsing from roughly 6% in October 2025 to about 2% in March 2026 — a 65% drop in five months, even as Gemini and Claude gained share over the same window.

The takeaway: Perplexity's absolute numbers (users, queries, and especially revenue, which has tripled since March) are all still growing fast, but on every relative measure of market share, it's losing ground faster than any other major AI platform except DeepSeek and Copilot — and Statcounter's August reading confirms that slide has now run three consecutive months rather than stabilizing. The reported Nvidia-led funding talks suggest investors are betting on the revenue trajectory and the enterprise/browser diversification, not on Perplexity reversing its chatbot referral-share decline. That's precisely why the company keeps pushing into Comet, OS-level assistant deals, Microsoft 365 distribution, and advertising rather than relying on chatbot share alone.