Perplexity AI statistics: its run rate tripled to $750 million by August, while its referral share halved

Perplexity's run rate tripled in 2026 while its share of AI referrals halved

Each Perplexity number below links to whoever published it first. Perplexity is private and confirms few of its own figures, so the Source column says who stands behind each one. The Date column is the period a figure covers.

Perplexity's price has fallen against its sales. In September 2025 it was valued at $20 billion with a run rate approaching $200 million, about 100 times. The round Nvidia was discussing in August 2026, at more than $30 billion on more than $750 million, is about 40 times. For scale, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May 2026 on a run rate of more than $47 billion, about 20 times. So Perplexity still costs twice Anthropic's multiple. In September 2025 the gap was wider: Anthropic's $183 billion on more than $5 billion was about 37 times, and Perplexity was nearly three times that.

Blue dots are closed rounds and reported run rates. The orange dot is the round Nvidia was discussing in August 2026, which we found no report of closing by 12 October. Each dot sits on the day the figure was reported, or the first of the month it covers. None of them came from a Perplexity filing: the company is private, and it declined to comment on most of them.

How fast is Perplexity's revenue growing?

Perplexity added about $2.1 million of annualized revenue a day in 2026, going by reported figures. It began the year under $250 million and passed $750 million by late August, per The Information, as Reuters reported on 23 August 2026. That's three times in under eight months.

The jump came after Perplexity changed what it sells. It launched Computer, an agent that carries out tasks on its own, in February 2026, and it moved to pricing based on use. Revenue rose 50% in one month, the Financial Times reported on 8 April. Computer runs on credits, and Max subscribers get 10,000 of them a month, per Perplexity's pricing page.

Sacra's own model lands in the same place: $232 million at the end of 2025 and $750 million in August 2026. Those are its estimates, not company figures. A run rate isn't money in the bank, either. It takes a recent month and scales it up to a year, so when sales triple, the books lag well behind.

How much is Perplexity worth?

Perplexity is worth $20 billion, the value set by its last reported round, a $200 million raise in September 2025, per The Information as reported by TechCrunch. In August 2026 The Information reported talks with Nvidia at more than $30 billion, which Reuters said would be over 50% above the round a year before. Perplexity declined to comment.

That's a 38 times rise in value from January 2024 to September 2025. Perplexity had raised about $1.5 billion in all by then, per PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch. Some trackers list a January 2026 round at $21 billion to $23 billion. We couldn't find it in any outlet's reporting or in a Perplexity post, so it isn't in the table.

Perplexity has bid for things bigger than itself, too. In August 2025 it offered $34.5 billion in cash for Google's Chrome browser, close to twice its own $18 billion value at the time, per Al Jazeera. Google didn't sell. Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, told CNBC in June 2026 that the company plans to go public in 2028, Reuters reported.

How many people use Perplexity?

Perplexity has more than 100 million monthly active users across its search and agent tools, company executives told the Financial Times in April 2026. It doesn't publish a standard user count. The last search-only count we could open at a company source is 10 million monthly active users, from January 2024. Statistics sites also carry about 30 million for April 2025. We found no Perplexity post or interview behind that one, so it isn't in the table.

Similarweb's numbers are visits, not people, and they're its own estimates. Its September 2026 overview lists 91.7 million visits to perplexity.ai, against 1 billion for claude.ai on the same kind of page. The US sent 25.13% of them, India 8.2% and Germany 5.51%. Visitors were 56.02% male, the largest age group was 25 to 34, and the average visit lasted 4 minutes 19 seconds.

India shows what a free bundle does. Bharti Airtel gave all 360 million of its customers a year of Perplexity Pro at no cost on 17 July 2025, per Airtel's release. Sensor Tower estimates that monthly users in India went from an average of about 2.6 million in the first half of 2025 to about 22 million in October 2025, TechCrunch reported on 18 August 2026. By July 2026 it had them at about 14 million.

There's no survey share to quote for the US. Pew Research Center's February 2026 list of the chatbots Americans use has seven names, from ChatGPT at 44% to Character.ai at 3%. Perplexity isn't one of them.

How many queries does Perplexity answer a month?

Perplexity answered 780 million queries in May 2025, the last company wide count it has given. Srinivas gave the figure at Bloomberg Tech in June 2025 and said queries were growing more than 20% a month, per TechCrunch. As of October 2026 he hasn't given a newer total.

Srinivas set a goal in the same talk. "Give it a year, we'll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate," he said. A billion a week is about 4.3 billion a month, 5.6 times the May 2025 count. Perplexity hasn't said it got there. Pages that put 2026 volume at 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion a month are working from the 2025 number.

The best outside check comes from a rival. An OpenAI strategy deck dated January 2025, filed by the Justice Department as exhibit PXR0182 in its search case against Google, says Perplexity's 20 million daily messages in December 2024 were up from 2 million at the start of 2024. The same slide estimates Google's AI Overviews at 595 million queries a day, about 30 times Perplexity, as a share of the 8.3 billion searches a day OpenAI puts Google at. Both are OpenAI's estimates, and the slide itself says "reports vary."

Set Perplexity's 30 million a day from mid 2025 against that 8.3 billion estimate and it's about 0.4% of Google's volume. The two figures are six months apart, so read it as a rough scale.

What share of AI search does Perplexity have?

Perplexity sent 5.85% of the clicks that AI chatbots passed to websites in September 2026, per StatCounter. That puts it third, behind ChatGPT at 80.48% and Gemini at 10.91%. It had 12.07% in April 2025.

Gemini passed Perplexity in March 2026, at 8.65% against 7.07%. Perplexity's low point was August 2026, at about 4.3%. StatCounter counts referrals, the clicks out from a chatbot to a site, and Perplexity is built around cited links, so it scores well for its size. Visits tell a smaller story. For both counts side by side, see AI chatbot market share.

StatCounter's CEO, Aodhan Cullen, said in May 2026 that "optimising for a single AI chatbot is no longer sufficient," per its press release. The monthly figures to April 2026 above come from that release.

Perplexity's crawlers are big too. On 4 August 2025, Cloudflare said Perplexity's declared crawlers made 20 million to 25 million requests a day on its network, and undeclared ones another 3 million to 6 million, across tens of thousands of domains. Cloudflare took Perplexity off its verified bot list.

Who is suing Perplexity?

Publishers and platforms had filed ten suits against Perplexity as of 12 October 2026, by our count from court records listed by AI Lawsuit Tracker and from news reports. Six of the suits are in federal court in Manhattan, two in Tokyo, one in Rome and one in San Francisco. None had reached a final judgment.

Eight of the ten are about copying news, reference or film content. AI Lawsuit Tracker also lists a privacy suit, dropped in May 2026, and a June 2026 case it gives no claim for. We left both out and added the three Japanese papers it doesn't list. The Times' own quarterly filing says it sued over "copyright infringement, trademark dilution and trademark infringement" and seeks money and an order to stop Perplexity. Nikkei and Asahi each ask for ¥2.2 billion, about $15 million, per Bloomberg Law.

CNN says Perplexity copied thousands of its stories, videos and images, per Al Jazeera. Perplexity's spokesperson, Jesse Dwyer, replied: "You can't copyright facts."

One case has gone Perplexity's way so far. A judge barred its Comet browser agent from shopping on Amazon accounts in March 2026, and the Ninth Circuit threw out that order in early August, Engadget reported on 4 August. Perplexity also pays some publishers. It set aside $42.5 million in August 2025 for Comet Plus, a $5 a month plan that sends 80% of its revenue to publishers, Bloomberg reported, per TipRanks.

What does Perplexity cost, and who pays whom?

Perplexity Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly, and Max costs $200, or $167 a month billed yearly, as of October 2026. The yearly prices are on Perplexity's pricing page, read on 12 October 2026. Max adds 10,000 Computer credits a month. Our Perplexity Pro review works out when Pro pays for itself.

Money flows the other way, too. Perplexity agreed to pay Snap $400 million over a year, in cash and stock, to be the answer engine inside Snapchat from 2026, Snap said in November 2025, per Outlook Business. Bloomberg reported a $750 million deal to use Microsoft's Azure cloud, signed in 2026, Reuters said.

You can also reach Perplexity's Sonar Pro model on Whizi's Pro plan, at $29.99 a month, where one answer spends 20 credits and sits in the same chat as Claude and GPT. Whizi doesn't have Comet or Computer, and it dropped Perplexity's Sonar Deep Research model on 19 August 2026. If those tools are why you pay, Perplexity is the better buy.

Where does each Perplexity number come from?

We opened every figure at its source on 11 and 12 October 2026. Those sources are Perplexity's pricing page, StatCounter, Similarweb, Sacra, Pew, Airtel, Cloudflare, an SEC filing, a Justice Department exhibit and the court records on AI Lawsuit Tracker. Where a reporter saw numbers we can't, we name the outlet: the Financial Times, The Information, Bloomberg, Reuters or TechCrunch. Where we could only reach a paywalled story through another outlet, the link goes to that outlet and the table says so.

We left out what we couldn't trace. That cut a 45 million monthly user figure, 2026 query counts of 1.2 billion and more, the January 2026 round some trackers list, and a claim that 90% of users return within 30 days. Each of those appears only on statistics sites. The multiples, the daily revenue pace, the lawsuit count and the share of Google's volume are our own math. We'll update this page when Perplexity files to go public.

How should you cite these Perplexity statistics?

You're free to use any figure or table on this page with a link back to it. Please credit the original source for numbers that came from someone else, too. A plain credit line like this one works:

Source: Whizi Research, "Perplexity AI statistics: its run rate tripled to $750 million by August, while its referral share halved", whizi.io/resources/perplexity-statistics, updated October 2026.

The same series covers its rivals: Claude statistics, ChatGPT statistics and Gemini statistics.