By Rachyl Jones
Publication Date: 2026-01-16 17:49:00
When Perplexity made a $34.5 billion unsolicited bid for Google Chrome last August, it was largely seen as a publicity stunt. Google had just lost its antitrust lawsuit with the Justice Department, and a US federal judge was considering whether it should be required to sell off Chrome.
It turns out, Perplexity never thought the deal would go through if a judge didn’t force it, the company told me. And there was more to the multibillion-dollar bid than a publicity play. Perplexity, which pitches itself as a hybrid between a traditional search engine and AI chatbot, used the bid as a defensive measure to protect its own business and, it says, the state of the internet.
Let me explain. Perplexity has built its own AI-powered browser, called Comet, on top of the free and open-source software that underpins Chrome and several other browsers. If Google were ever to sell Chrome, it’s unclear what would happen to Chromium, which hosts the browsers. And any buyer that mucked with the platform would mess with one of Perplexity’s most important products.
In this sense, Perplexity figured that if it bid for Chrome, it could use the deal terms to send a signal to the greater market about how important it was to maintain the sanctity of the open-source software. Under its proposed terms, Perplexity also committed to keep users’ default search engines — oftentimes Google — unchanged on the browser. In the potential war for Chrome, Perplexity wanted to set a floor for offers to…
