Perplexity will soon start selling ads within AI search

Perplexity will soon begin to pay publishers when their content is used to form a specific type of the AI search engine’s answers. The business modell revolves around a revenue share from ad sales, an approach that marks a new chapter for the upstart AI company. 

Ads have long been a deeply integrated part of Google search results, but building ad inventory into new AI search answers is a new frontier. Google, for example, runs ads alongside its AI Overviews answers, but not within them. Perplexity, by contrast, never served ads with its search results.

Until now.

Starting later this quarter, Perplexity will let brands buy “related follow-up questions” that will appear below the initial answer to a user query. The questions will be clearly labeled as sponsored, Perplexity says. The brand will pay Perplexity a certain (undisclosed) fee for every thousand user views of the sponsored question. When a publisher’s content is used in Perplexity’s answer to the sponsored question, it earns a “double digit” percentage of ad revenue, Perplexity says.  

Publisher partners will also get free access to Perplexity’s large language models, via an API, so they’ll be able to create their own answer engines that form answers based on the publisher’s own content. A new site, for example, might use an answer bot to let readers ask questions about stories. Publishers also get access to Perplexity’s Pro service tier for all its employees for a year. 

Perplexity has come under fire recently for scraping publishers’ content in order to compose answers to user search questions. (The company was also accused of crawling websites even after publishers denied permission to do so.) 

Publishers have naturally been very wary of AI search. While traditional search engines invite users to click out to relevant content from numerous sites and publishers, AI search tools do the work for them, piecing together full answers from content it’s already collected in its web index, and presenting it all in one place. AI search tools usually give users the option of linking out to the original  sources via citations and other links, but it’s not always necessary. In those cases, the publisher is denied a site visitor who might buy a subscription, or view an ad, or share something on social media.  

Now Perplexity says it’s modifying its processes and products based on feedback from publisher partners, which currently include the likes of Time, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and German news site Der Spiegel. Beyond the ad revenue share, Perplexity says it recently updated how its systems index and cite sources. “We’re also collecting feedback to guide our product roadmap and new feature releases,” it said in a press release.  

“We had some thought experiments about what must be true in the internet ecosystem in order for Perplexity to be successful,” said Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko during an interview with Fast Company Monday. “One thing is there has to be a vibrant set of business models and revenue streams for publishers, because Perplexity relies on a steady stream of facts about the world.”

The news comes just days after OpenAI finally went public with its own AI web search tool, which it’s now testing with a small number of users and hopes to eventually add to its ChatGPT app. OpenAI says it is striking content agreements with web publishers, but the terms of those agreements are not yet known.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91163900/perplexity-selling-ads-ai-search?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss