Perplexity grows to 780 million monthly queries

Perplexity is on pace to serve 1 billion queries a week within the next year, according to CEO and co-founder Aravind Srinivas. That means Perplexity could answer 52 billion queries annually.

• “In May, we did about 780 million queries. That’s growing 20% month over month,” he said at the Bloomberg Tech event in San Francisco.

Why we care. AI answer engines continue to gain traction. Still, right now, AI tools are tiny compared to Google. By comparison, Google sees 52 million queries in about four days and about 98 billion searches in an entire week.

Taking shots. Google’s AI search products are stuck in a loop of rebrands without launching for most users, according to Srinivas.

• “In 2023, they called it Search Generative Experience. In 2024, they called it AI Overview. This year they call it AI Mode. Next year, they’ll call her another name. But … the feature never gets shipped to the user,” he said.

Google can’t afford to go full “AI mode” (pardon the pun) and replace traditional search completely because its ad business depends on it, Srinivas said.

• “They need the money. That’s the money paying for all the R&D spend on Gemini.”

He also indirectly accused Google of lying about AI citations resulting in less traffic referrals:

• “We hope to drive traffic through those citations. I’m never going to lie and say stuff like oh, we’re still sending a lot of traffic and all the stuff that the bigger companies are trying to say. All that’s definitely wrong. We have been very transparent that, yes, there will be less traffic referrals from these UIs and we are being open about it,” Srinivas said.

What’s next . Don’t call it a browser – Perplexity is building a hybridized “cognitive operating system” called Comet that aims to challenge Chrome by integrating navigation, information, and activity.

• “Answers are essentially four or five searches in one. Actions are like an entire browsing session in one prompt,” Srinivas said.

The interview. Perplexity CEO Srinivas on Winning Search With AI