Last August, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote a letter to Sundar Pichai offering $34.5 billion for Google‘s Chrome browser—a figure that was nearly double Perplexity’s own valuation at the time. Seven months later, on the same day his company launched the iPhone version of its Comet browser, Srinivas posted something that cuts right against the narrative of an all-out war with Google: on Comet iOS, Google is the default search engine. And he’s not apologetic about it.“Google does a much better job here than anyone else in the world, including Perplexity,” Srinivas wrote on X, specifically calling out navigational searches—think finding a restaurant nearby, checking a sports score, or hunting for a hotel deal. These are the everyday, quick-hit queries that make up the bulk of mobile browsing, and Srinivas is openly conceding that Google has them wrapped up.
Comet on iPhone keeps Google search , layers Perplexity on top
The Comet iOS app—now free, after the desktop version debuted last summer at $200 a month—takes a different approach from the PC version, which does not default to Google. Srinivas explained the thinking: the browser blends Google’s “navigational speed and breadth of verticals” with Perplexity’s answer quality and multimodal capabilities. The Comet Assistant sits on top of any webpage, including Google’s own results page, ready to jump in when a navigational answer isn’t what you need. Voice mode access is baked in too.Technically, Comet is still built on Chromium—the same open-source engine that powers Chrome, Edge, and a stack of other browsers—but Srinivas says the UI and interactions are all native, putting it closer to Safari-level polish on iOS. Native ad blocking and background video playback round out the feature set.
A $34.5 billion bid that went nowhere—and a browser that launched anyway
The Chrome acquisition saga ended quietly in September 2025 when US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google does not need to divest either Chrome or Android. Perplexity, meanwhile, kept building. The Comet browser is now available across iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac, with no native iPad app yet.What makes Srinivas’s latest comments interesting isn’t the praise for Google—it’s the pragmatism. Rather than positioning Comet as a Google killer, he’s framing it as the browser that knows when to hand off to Google and when to step in itself. That’s a harder pitch to make, but probably an honest one.
