Amazon refiles its case against Perplexity’s Comet
The fight over whether AI agents can browse and shop on a site without permission is back in court, and news publishers have joined in on Amazon’s side.
Amazon has filed an amended complaint against Perplexity over Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser that can shop on Amazon on a user’s behalf. The new filing, dated November 4, 2026, argues that Perplexity controls Comet at every relevant step inside Amazon’s systems.
What happened
According to reporting on the case, an earlier ban on the agent was overturned on appeal in August, and Amazon came back with the amended complaint. US news publishers have since backed Amazon. Their trade group argues that unauthorised agent access should be blockable, and that agents make it harder to measure real human audiences and ad revenue.
Perplexity faces other disputes too. Publishers have accused it of using content without a licence, including claims that it fetched pages that had blocked its crawler in robots.txt.
What it means for you
The outcome will shape what AI agents are allowed to do on websites: read pages, fill in forms, add items to a cart. For now:
- Decide your policy. Agents that act for a user often identify themselves differently from crawlers, for example
Perplexity-UserorChatGPT-User. - Check what you allow. robots.txt rules for training bots don’t automatically cover user-triggered agents.
- Log agent traffic. Server logs are the only reliable way to see which agents actually visit.
The AI Agent Readiness Checker shows which agent bots can reach your pages.