The November 2026 Perplexity AI statistics report: 89 sourced figures

This month's report on Perplexity is part of our AI statistics report. It covers revenue and valuation, users and queries, three measures of share, distribution deals, who uses the product, and what it means for publishers. Every figure is printed as its source states it, with the source's date and the sample or method beside it. Company statements are kept apart from measurement-firm estimates and from figures that news outlets reported; each table row says which it is. Figures we could not trace to a source are listed near the end and left out of the tables. Each table gives the figure, the source and date, the sample or method, and the day we checked it.

Perplexity AI statistics at a glance

• Perplexity sent 5.84% of AI chatbot referrals to websites worldwide in September 2026; Statcounter.
• Perplexity held 0.9% of generative-AI website traffic in the September 2026 update from Similarweb; websites only.
• Annualised revenue was reported at more than $750 million on 23 August 2026; Reuters, reporting The Information.
• More than 100 million monthly active users "from its search and agent tools" in April 2026; the Financial Times citing company executives, reported, relayed by PYMNTS.
• Samsung Browsing Assist, built on Perplexity's APIs, reaching more than 1 billion Samsung devices in March 2026; Perplexity, a company statement.
• PerplexityBot ended 2025 about 3.5x its January level; Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review.
• Comet agent queries split 55% personal, 30% professional and 16% educational; arXiv paper 2512.07828, December 2025, by Jeremy Yang and five co-authors.
• A $42.5 million pool opened to publishers in August 2025; Digiday.

Perplexity revenue and valuation

Perplexity's annualised revenue was reported at more than $750 million in August 2026, up from less than $250 million at the start of 2026. Both figures come from Reuters, reporting The Information, and both are reported figures, not audited ones. A funding round in talks would value Perplexity at more than $30 billion; that round had not closed when it was reported.

Annualised revenue has climbed through a chain of reported figures from several outlets. The start-of-2026 figure from Reuters and the $305 million figure from the Financial Times are different reports, so we print them as two rows and never blend them into one number.

Annualised revenue and ARR, as reported; no figure here is audited.

On valuation, the last finalised round is September 2025: $200 million at $20 billion, reported by The Information via Reuters. Before that, Bloomberg reported $100 million at an $18 billion valuation in July 2025. Reported August 2026 talks would lift the value by more than 50% on the financing a year earlier. Reuters also noted a $750 million agreement with Microsoft for the Azure cloud service, signed earlier in 2026, and said part of the revenue growth has been driven by Perplexity Computer, the company's cloud-based AI agent.

Valuation, funding and the IPO plan.

On going public, the chief executive has held to 2028. Asked on CNBC in June 2026, as Anthropic and OpenAI prepared listings, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said: "Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028 so that still remains the case". The chief business officer calls 2028 the earliest date for an IPO.

Perplexity users and queries

The latest user figure is more than 100 million monthly active users across Perplexity's search and agent tools, from April 2026, reported by the Financial Times citing company executives. The last query count the company gave is 780 million queries in May 2025, from the chief executive. The two figures use different definitions and different dates, so they do not sit on one line.

What Perplexity has said about users and queries

In April 2025 The Verge put Perplexity at nearly 30 million monthly active users, and the chief executive said it served about 600 million queries a month. At Bloomberg's Tech Summit in June 2025, the CEO put May 2025 queries at 780 million and daily queries at 30 million, against 3,000 on the first day in 2022. His projection at the same event was a billion queries a week within a year, conditional on that growth rate holding; we label it a projection, not a count. The April 2026 figure of more than 100 million monthly users, reported by the Financial Times, covers search and agent tools.

Outside the company, the measurement firm Similarweb says visits and unique visitors to Perplexity's website both peaked around October 2025 and have declined in most months since. Of the four platforms in its comparison, Perplexity is the only one whose most recent trend points down. Similarweb's figures cover website traffic only, with data to May 2026.

User and query figures, each with its source's definition.

India, the one fresh user series

Sensor Tower estimates Perplexity's India monthly users at nearly 14 million in July 2026, down 37% from the October 2025 peak of 22 million. The estimates come via TechCrunch. The rise followed an offer with Airtel, India's second-biggest telecom operator: from July 2025, a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally worth about $200, was offered to the carrier's 360 million customers. Sensor Tower estimates 56 million downloads in the seven months the offer could be claimed.

"While the time-sensitive nature of this promotion would naturally lead to a decline in adoption after the offer period, ongoing usage has remained resilient," said Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, in August 2026.

TechCrunch notes that Sensor Tower cannot "separate former Airtel subscribers from other paying customers", so the India figures cannot show how many payers came through the offer. India figures are estimates, and they are not worldwide figures.

India monthly active users, Sensor Tower estimates.

Perplexity market share, three measures

Website traffic, referrals to websites and US mobile daily app users are three different measures, and each shows Perplexity small and falling. On website traffic, Similarweb puts Perplexity at 0.9% of generative-AI traffic in its September 2026 update. On referrals to websites, Statcounter puts Perplexity at 5.84% worldwide in September 2026, against 12.07% in April 2025. On US mobile daily active users, Apptopia puts Perplexity at 2.1% in March 2026. We never present the three as one number. The same measures for every platform sit in our AI statistics hub: every platform's numbers.

Website traffic share (Similarweb)

Perplexity's share of generative-AI website traffic fell from 2.5% in October 2025 to 0.9% in Similarweb's September 2026 update. The Decoder's reading of the August update groups Perplexity with the smaller platforms that "remain bit players". The figures cover website traffic only; apps are not counted. Similarweb prints the month beside each column, so we print its months.

Generative-AI website traffic share for Perplexity, from Similarweb's September 2026 update.

Referrals to websites (Statcounter)

Statcounter measures each chatbot's share of AI chatbot referrals to websites. Perplexity sent 5.84% of AI chatbot referrals worldwide in September 2026, down from a peak of 12.07% in April 2025, with the low of the run at 4.34% in August 2026. Google Gemini passed Perplexity as the second-largest referral source in March 2026, when Gemini reached 8.65% against Perplexity's 7.07%; we track Gemini's figures on our Google Gemini statistics page.

Statcounter's sample is over 3 billion page views a month to over 1 million websites. Grok cannot be included because, unlike the other chatbots, it does not provide referral data in its header; our Grok AI statistics page covers what can and cannot be measured.

In the UK, Perplexity's referral share fell from 7.16% in April 2025 to 2.74% in September 2026.

Perplexity's share of AI chatbot referrals to websites worldwide, by month.

How Statcounter measures, and the UK pair.

US mobile app users (Apptopia)

Apptopia measures daily active users of the top seven US chatbot apps. Perplexity fell from a US peak of about 6% in October 2025 to below 2% by the February 2026 data. Apptopia put it at 2.1% in March 2026, though March showed the first signs of a recovery. Worldwide, the same firm has Perplexity declining from a peak near 8% to about 4%.

Perplexity on US mobile, share of daily active users among the top seven chatbot apps.

Perplexity products and distribution deals

Perplexity reaches people through other companies' devices and apps, and every figure in this section is a company statement unless marked. The Perplexity app comes preloaded on every Samsung Galaxy S26, and Samsung's Bixby uses Perplexity's APIs for search and reasoning; Perplexity says it is the first non-Google company to have OS-level access in a Samsung phone. Computer, the company's agent, arrived in Microsoft Teams on 4 May 2026 and inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook on 28 May 2026, for paying plans only. The Comet browser had a limited release on 9 July 2025 and went free worldwide on 2 October 2025.

"If people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention," said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, at Bloomberg's Tech Summit in June 2025, on the Comet browser it was building.

One gap: Perplexity declined to tell Digiday how many Comet users it had, one month after launch, so there is no company user count for the browser.

Distribution deals and product launches.

Who uses Perplexity and for what

The one usage split with a stated sample covers Comet agent queries, not Perplexity's web search: 55% personal, 30% professional and 16% educational. It comes from a December 2025 paper on arXiv by Jeremy Yang and five co-authors, drawing on hundreds of millions of anonymised Comet interactions. The two largest topics, Productivity & Workflow and Learning & Research, account for 57% of agentic queries. The authors find earlier adopters, users in countries with higher GDP per capita and educational attainment, and knowledge-sector workers more likely to use the agent. We found no readable primary source for age, gender or country splits, so none is printed.

What Comet's agent queries are for, from the arXiv paper.

What Perplexity means for publishers and SEOs

Cloudflare measured Perplexity's crawl-to-refer ratio rising from 54.6 in January 2025 to 194.8 in July 2025, and de-listed Perplexity as a verified bot on 4 August 2025 after what Cloudflare calls stealth crawling. On referrals, Statcounter's September 2026 series has ChatGPT at 80.47% of AI chatbot referrals against Perplexity's 5.84%; the ChatGPT figures sit on our ChatGPT statistics and referral share page. On payments, Perplexity's Comet Plus sends 80% of pooled subscription revenue to participants in its publisher programme.

Crawling and referrals

The crawl-to-refer ratio measures how many pages a platform crawls compared with how often it sends users to a website. Crawling is the first step in how a search engine crawls, indexes and ranks pages; referrals are the visits that come back. Cloudflare's monthly figures have Perplexity at 54.6 crawls per referred visit in January 2025 and 194.8 in July 2025.

In a separate 2025 review, Cloudflare says Perplexity had the lowest crawl-to-refer ratios of the major AI platforms, starting 2025 below 100:1 before spiking above 700:1 in late March. That spike comes from a different Cloudflare series, so we keep it apart. Cloudflare's own caveat is that native-app referrals may carry no Referer header, so the ratios may be overstated, by an amount it cannot give.

On 4 August 2025 Cloudflare said it had de-listed Perplexity as a verified bot and added heuristics to its managed rules to block what it found to be stealth crawling. The activity was observed across tens of thousands of domains and millions of requests a day, and Cloudflare reported continued evidence that Perplexity repeatedly modified its user agent and changed source ASNs to hide the crawling. These are Cloudflare's findings, stated with their date; Perplexity's response is not in our sources.

Perplexity's crawling, measured by Cloudflare.

What Perplexity pays publishers

Comet Plus is a $5 standalone subscription, included in Pro and Max. Perplexity calls it the first compensation model that allocates revenue on three types of traffic: human visits, search citations and agent actions. We cover search citations in generative engine optimisation and link building. Perplexity keeps 20% of the pooled subscription revenue and 80% goes to publisher-programme participants, the company's head of publisher partnerships told Digiday in August 2025. Digiday also reported a $42.5 million pool opened to publishers. The publishers' programme itself started on 30 July 2024 with TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com.

Comet Plus and the publishers' programme.

The lawsuits

Three publisher suits sit on court dockets. Dow Jones & Company filed against Perplexity AI on 21 October 2024. Encyclopaedia Britannica filed on 10 September 2025. The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune sued in December 2025, and in March 2026 Reuters reported that Perplexity had asked a US judge to dismiss a series of claims in that pair of suits. No ruling on the merits appears in our sources.

The publisher lawsuits, with courts and dockets.

Figures we left out

Roundup pages carry Perplexity figures we could not trace to a primary source. Each is left out of the tables; where we print a figure instead, it is named.

• A $22.6 billion Series E-6 valuation: no primary found. We print the last finalised round, $20 billion in September 2025, reported by The Information via Reuters.
• $1.72 billion raised across 11 rounds, attributed to Gradually AI: not traced. We print $1.5 billion in total funding per PitchBook data, September 2025.
• A 27-40x revenue multiple: no source behind the arithmetic; left out.
• More than 1 billion queries a month: no 2026 statement found. We print the chief executive's 780 million queries in May 2025 and his projection of a billion queries a week.
• About 45 million monthly users on the core answer engine, attributed to Airefs: not traced. We print nearly 30 million monthly users in April 2025 from The Verge, and more than 100 million across search and agent tools in April 2026 from the Financial Times.
• 85-90% of users returning within 30 days, and sessions of 4-12 minutes: no source found; left out.
• 170-179 million monthly website visits: the primary page could not be read; left out.
• About 18 million Comet monthly users, and an App Store rank: no primary; Digiday recorded in August 2025 that Perplexity declined to share Comet user numbers.
• More than 2,400 publishers in the programme: no company page found. We print the launch partners from Perplexity's July 2024 announcement.
• Gender, age and five-country splits, attributed to DemandSage: no readable primary; left out.

FAQ

How much revenue does Perplexity make?

Reuters, relaying The Information, reported annualised revenue of more than $750 million in August 2026, up from less than $250 million at the start of 2026; neither figure is audited.

What is Perplexity worth?

The last finalised round valued Perplexity at $20 billion in September 2025, reported by The Information via Reuters. Talks reported by Reuters in August 2026 would value it above $30 billion, but that round had not closed.

How many people use Perplexity?

More than 100 million monthly active users across its search and agent tools, reported in April 2026 by the Financial Times citing company executives. In April 2025, The Verge put monthly users at nearly 30 million.

Is Perplexity losing market share?

On Statcounter's referral measure, yes: Perplexity sent 12.07% of AI chatbot referrals worldwide in April 2025 and 5.84% in September 2026. Referrals are visits arriving at websites, not user counts.

Does Perplexity send traffic to websites?

Some, but little next to its crawling: the measurement firm Cloudflare counted 194.8 Perplexity crawls per referred visit in July 2025.

Is Perplexity going public?

Not before 2028 on the company's own words: the CEO said in June 2026 it was still planning for 2028, and the chief business officer's June 2026 statement calls 2028 the earliest date for an IPO.

How we check these figures

We open every figure at the earliest page we can read and copy the sentence it stands on. Each row carries the source's own date and, beside the number, the sample or method the source gives. We keep three kinds of figure apart: what Perplexity says about itself, what a measurement firm estimates, and what news outlets report from their own sources. Figures we could not trace to a source are named in their own list and left out of the tables. We re-open every source each month and republish the page with the month in the title.