Perplexity will soon show ads

Perplexity is one of the oldest AI-powered search engines on the market, and it’s proven to be a powerful tool. While it’s remained largely unchanged for the most part, we’ve been following the news that it wanted to add advertisements to the platform. Well, now it’s finally happening; Perplexity will soon show ads.

In case you don’t know what Perplexity is, it’s a search engine that surfaces AI-generated summaries of what you searched for. It’s similar to ChatGPT Search and Google’s AI Overviews. Unfortunately, this is another AI-powered tool that allows users to skip going to actual websites and get the answers that they want right away. It does surface the links from where it got its information. However, this is only a short list of sites and not the vast selection that you’d see from a traditional search engine.

Perplexity will soon show ads

Perplexity has a subscription service where users can pay monthly for additional features. However, the company announced that this business model doesn’t provide the appropriate revenue to keep the company running. The cost of AI is increasing at a quick pace, so it makes sense that subscriptions aren’t enough.

As such, the company will display advertisements in the form of sponsored follow-up questions. Companies will pay Perplexity to display these questions. For example, if you’re using Perplexity to help look for a job, you could see a follow-up like “See how LinkedIn can help you with your job search.”

As you can imagine, when you click on that follow-up, it will lead you to LinkedIn. These sponsored questions won’t be provided by the advertisers. Rather, they’ll be AI-generated.

Perplexity will split the revenue it gains with the advertisers, so there’s mutual benefit to this program. Right now, the list of advertisers consists of Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann, and PMG. As time goes on, we expect that list to grow. We’re not sure that other AI search engines will follow this model.