Perplexity will put ads in its AI search engine and share revenue with publishers<p>When people type a question into Perplexity, the two-year-old search engine scours the internet and uses information from multiple sources, including online publishers, to synthesize an answer using AI. Soon, Perplexity will start sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch around the end of September, the company announced on Tuesday.</p>
<p>The initiative, known as the Perplexity Publishers’ Program, comes less than two months after the San Francisco-based startup backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, and valued at $3 billion, came under fire from <a data-i13n="cpos:1;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/amazon-investigating-perplexity-ai-after-accusations-it-scrapes-websites-without-consent-133003374.html">
Forbes[/url], <a data-i13n="cpos:2;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/ai-companies-are-reportedly-still-scraping-websites-despite-protocols-meant-to-block-them-132308524.html">
Wired[/url], and <a data-i13n="cpos:3;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/conde-nast-has-reportedly-accused-ai-search-startup-perplexity-of-plagiarism-191639677.html">Condé Nast[/url] for allegedly scraping content without permission and ignoring robots.txt, a type of file that websites use to block page-crawling bots.</p>
<span id="end-legacy-contents"></span><p>Perplexity’s initial partners include
TIME,
Fortune,
The Texas Tribune,
Der Spiegel and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It’s not clear exactly how much revenue Perplexity will share with publishers. Dmitry Shevelenko, the company’s chief business officer, declined to reveal numbers but told Engadget that it would be a “meaningful double-digit percentage shared back with the publishers that contributed source input to the answer." He also said that the partnership would extend across multiple years without specifying how many. What this wasn’t, Shevelenko insisted repeatedly, was a response to the critical press coverage in the last few months. “We’ve been talking to publishers since January,” he claimed. “No aspect of this program is reactive to these recent accusations.”</p>
<p>For months, publishers around the world have <a data-i13n="cpos:4;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/ai-companies-are-reportedly-still-scraping-websites-despite-protocols-meant-to-block-them-132308524.html">been concerned[/url] about the potential of AI-powered search engines and chatbots to decimate traffic by simply <a data-i13n="cpos:5;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/who-makes-money-when-ai-reads-the-internet-for-us-200246690.html">sucking up their content[/url] and using it to provide people with answers directly instead of having to actually visit their websites. Google has followed suit too — the company <a data-i13n="cpos:6;pos:1" href="
https://www.engadget.com/google-search-will-now-show-ai-generated-answers-to-millions-by-default-174512845.html">now sources[/url] answers from search results and displays AI-generated versions at the top of the page. But so far, it doesn’t compensate publishers.</p>
<p>
Perplexity will put ads in its AI search engine and share revenue with publishers
