AI conversational search engine Perplexity is taking a page from Google’s advertising playbook with a new sponsorship scheme. Companies will be able to pay for one of the “related follow-up questions” users see when they ask Perplexity to research something. The paid question will be labeled as such, like the sponsored links in a Google search. Perplexity has previously made a point of saying that advertising-driven models don’t affect the AI’s responses. Presumably, that applies to everything but these sponsored follow-up questions.
The companies in question are publishers whose work Perplexity’s AI may pull from in its responses. The initial cohort includes TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com. The sponsors and Perplexity will divide revenue in some undisclosed manner, with the companies paying Perplexity based on the number of people who see the branded questions available.
