What Happens When AI Runs Your SEO? Perplexity’s New Comet Browser Put to the Test
The SE Ranking team put Perplexity's new AI browser Comet to work on three real SEO challenges: finding internal linking opportunities, analyzing competitor growth with Semrush, and synthesizing multi-tab research.
While Comet demonstrated impressive speed and agentic capabilities—pulling pages and anchor text in seconds, logging into tools, and running complex workflows—it struggled significantly with accuracy and quality.
The browser generated vague internal linking suggestions, hallucinated fake statistics in comparison tables, produced messy formatting with nonsense sources, and skipped critical information.
Comet functions well as a data-grabbing tool but falls short on meaningful synthesis and strategic decision-making, requiring extensive human oversight.
I told Perplexity's Comet to run real SEO tasks, deep tasks, and it was fast, it was confident, and it made a lot of mistakes. First, I asked Comet to find internal linking opportunities for my blog post in SE Ranking. It flew through the site pulling pages and even anchor text in seconds, but the actual results were not so great. A couple of solid suggestions like linking to our AI overviews article, but most were vague, shoehorned, or flatout irrelevant. It even tried stuffing three tool links into my CTA. So, impressive speed, but weak strategy. Next, I asked it to analyze SE Rankings growth using Semrush. It logged in, created a project, and ran keyword backlink and competitor research. That part was slick, but then it hallucinated 2022 numbers, literally inventing fake stats in a comparison table, but at least it admitted they were estimates. But still, don't make stuff up, comment, I'm watching you. Finally, I opened seven tabs on the num equals 100 issue and asked Comet to build research findings
around it. It parsed the pages fine, but dumped messy formatting into Google Docs and even threw in nonsense sources like YouTube.com, literally the basic YouTube website, and ignored two of the tabs. After a redo, I got something usable, but quality was low and required babysitting. So, can Comet do SEO tasks? Technically, yeah, it's agentic, fast, and can juggle complex workflows, but accuracy and quality, not so much. No, think of it as more of a flashy intern where it's great at grabbing data, but actual synthesis and turning it into something meaningful. No, I need to leave that to the actual experts, the human ones. Anyway, that's it for Perplexity's comment. What tool should I test next? Drop it below and make sure to subscribe to SE Ranking for more honest reviews like
Key takeaways
Chapters
Quotes
“It was fast, it was confident, and it made a lot of mistakes.” — SE Ranking
“Impressive speed, but weak strategy.” — SE Ranking
“Don't make stuff up.” — SE Ranking
“Think of it as more of a flashy intern where it's great at grabbing data, but actual synthesis and turning it into something meaningful—no, I need to leave that to the actual experts, the human ones.” — SE Ranking