When people type a question into Perplexity, the two-year-old search engine crawls the internet and uses information from multiple sources, including online publishers, to synthesize an answer using artificial intelligence. Soon, Perplexity will begin sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch in late September, the company announced Tuesday.
The initiative, known as the Perplexity Publishers' Program, comes less than two months after the San Francisco-based startup backed by investors including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA and valued at $3 billion came under fire for Forbes, With cableand Condé Nast for allegedly scraping content without permission and ignoring robots.txt, a type of file that websites use to block bots from crawling pages.
Perplexity's initial partners include TIME, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, Mirror and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It’s unclear exactly how much revenue Perplexity will share with publishers. Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s chief commercial officer, declined to disclose figures but told Engadget it would be a “significant double-digit percentage shared with publishers who contributed source information for the answer.” He also said the partnership would extend over several years without specifying how many. What this was not, Shevelenko repeatedly insisted, was a response to critical press coverage in recent months. “We’ve been talking to publishers since January,” he stated. “No aspect of this program is reactive to these recent allegations.”
For months, publishers around the world have been worried about the possibility that search engines and ai-powered chatbots could decimate traffic by simply sucking up their content and using it to provide people with answers directly instead of them having to visit their websites. Google has also followed suit: The company now scrapes answers from search results and displays ai-generated versions at the top of the page. But so far, it isn’t compensating publishers.
“(Our revenue share) is certainly much higher than Google’s revenue share with publishers, which is zero,” Shevelenko said. “The idea here is that we are making a long-term commitment. If we are successful, publishers will be able to generate this ancillary revenue stream as well.” Perplexity, he noted, was the first ai-powered search engine to include source citations when it launched in August 2022, though the company Reportedly redesigned Their user interface displays them more prominently after they are called by Forbes in June.
artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI have reached agreements with major publishers, including TIME, News Corporation, Voice, Axel Springerhe Financial Times and others to use their content to train ai models, writing checks ranging from $5 million to $250 million. Perplexity’s revenue-sharing program is different, though: Instead of writing big checks to publishers, Perplexity plans to share revenue every time the search engine uses their content in one of its ai-generated answers. The search engine has a “Related” section at the bottom of each answer that currently displays follow-up questions users can ask the engine. When the program rolls out, Perplexity plans to let brands pay to display specific follow-up questions in this section. Shevelenko told Engadget that the company is also exploring more ad formats, such as showing a video unit at the top of the page. “The main idea is that we run ads for brands that are targeted to certain query categories,” he said.
![Perplexity](https://technicalterrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Perplexity-will-place-ads-on-its-AI-search-engine-and.png)
This makes sense for Perplexity because it doesn’t train its own ai models. Instead, it lets users choose from leading ai models — like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Meta’s Llama 3.1 — to summarize responses from around the web. “It’s very simple,” Shelevenko said, “if we’re making money and a publisher’s content was used in that ad impression, the publisher will get a share of that revenue.”
But without knowing how much of the ad revenue Perplexity plans to split with publishers, it’s unclear whether the move will help publishers make up for lost revenue due to declining traffic as ai-generated search engines and chatbots become more popular. And breaking into an online advertising business dominated by Google and Meta isn’t easy. “Building an ad business takes time,” Toshit Panigrahi, founder of Tollbit, a startup that lets publishers monetize content by offering it to ai companies for a fee they can set themselves, told Engadget. “Publishers are expected to hand over content today in the hopes that Perplexity will establish a successful ad business and engage them.”
Shevelenko declined to comment on Perplexity’s recent disputes with publishers, but acknowledged that it had become more difficult to integrate them in recent months. “Some[of our conversations]were in a good moment,” he said, “and then the bad press came and, you know, more questions were raised.”