Amazon is reportedly suing Perplexity — the AI search and browser startup — over its Comet browser’s ability to “agentically” shop on Amazon.com. The lawsuit accuses Perplexity of using covert bots disguised as humans to access Amazon’s site and make purchases, essentially “undeclared agents” performing automated shopping.
“Perplexity’s misconduct must end,” Amazon states in the suit, alleging that the company “has purposely configured its CometAI software to not identify the Comet agent’s activity in the Amazon store.”
Perplexity, seemingly anticipating the litigation, published a blog post yesterday calling Amazon’s actions “bullying” and arguing that its agentic browsing technology enhances the consumer experience. The blog post goes on to say, “Amazon wants to eliminate user rights so that it can sell more ads,” referring to the company’s growing media business.
Why This Matters:
US advertisers will spend nearly $70 billion on retail media in 2026, according to EMARKETER. But what happens to a retailer’s — or any company’s — media network business when AI agents begin doing the browsing and buying for customers? Sure, it’s early, and that won’t truly scale for years. But it does threaten to slowly introduce chaos into these systems.
It could give advertisers pause over measurability and performance if impressions are bot-driven rather than human. Keep in mind, agentic bots also misclick and make mistakes. We’re already seeing verification and measurement vendors try to respond to this.
Experts React:
Here are some related posts on X about the situation:
Our Take:
An aside, but it feels like Perplexity is never going to sell its business, right? From Google to now Amazon, its Big Tech enemy list grows by the day. Apple isn’t on that list yet — though it reportedly plans to use Gemini for its devices in the near future.
Final aside: Perplexity may have its critics, but anecdotally — in our view — it works really well. Perhaps that’s related to their scraping methods, though. Remember this from a few weeks ago?
