If the browser reads for you, who gets paid?

If an AI browser reads the web on your behalf, should publishers count that as a visit, a search citation, or a paid action?

Perplexity introduced Comet on July 9, 2025 as a browser where the assistant can conduct browsing sessions, compare what you are reading with prior context, book meetings, send email, or buy something from instructions. 1

TechCrunch described Comet Assistant as a browser-side AI agent that can summarize email and calendar events, manage tabs, and navigate web pages, while its hands-on test also found access trade-offs and a wrong-date failure during a parking-booking task. 2

The publisher question gets sharper with Comet Plus: Perplexity says the model allocates revenue around three kinds of value, human visits, search citations, and agent actions. 3 Its initial launch partners included Condé Nast, Fortune, Le Figaro, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. 4

Cloudflare is pushing a different control layer: pay per crawl gives publishers allow, charge, or block choices for AI crawler access and uses HTTP 402 as a payment-required signal. 5

Reddit question: if the reader delegates the reading to an agent, what feels fair to you, paying like a user, treating it like browser traffic, or something else entirely?