Perplexity AI Inc. is offering publishers a share in the revenue their articles generate as the company looks to deal with criticism and legal action from some media outlets over use of their work.
The startup, which is building an AI search engine to compete with Google, has allocated $42.5 million to be distributed among publishers in the program, according to Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas.
“AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” he said. “So we think this is actually the right solution, and we are happy to make adjustments along the way.”
The media industry has clashed with artificial intelligence companies over concerns that AI-generated responses from tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews have cut valuable web traffic to their sites.
Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in an interview that the traditional model where media outlets rely on web traffic and clicks is “an old model”. “We just want to create a new standard for compensation,” she said.
In the new program, publishers will be able to earn money when their content receives web traffic through Perplexity’s Comet internet browser, appears in search queries on Comet and when it’s used to complete tasks by Comet’s AI assistant.
The funds for compensating publishers comes from the revenue earned from Comet Plus—a new subscription tier for the Comet browser that Srinivas described as being similar to Apple News. Customers will pay $5 a month to access a curated selection of content from the publishers in Perplexity’s new program. Publishers will get 80% of the revenue, Perplexity keeps the rest.
While AI companies like OpenAI and Google have made bespoke multimillion dollar deals with major publishers to licence and distribute content, Perplexity is one of the first AI startups to introduce a new method of sharing revenue based on how often content appears or assists in user queries.
Chan declined to say which publishers are already participating in the program, but said that Perplexity is in talks with previous media partners. The startup has previously teamed up with outlets like Time, The Los Angeles Times and Fortune on a program for sharing ad revenue.
Perplexity has also scuffled with some media organisations, with outlets like Forbes and Condé Nast accusing the company of using their content in AI news summaries without permission. The startup also lost a bid last week to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by News Corp.’s Dow Jones and the New York Post.
“We are confident AI companies will win all of these lawsuits,” Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said in a statement. “We look forward to settling the law on this early on, so that everyone can benefit from AI.”
Cybersecurity company Cloudflare Inc. has also accused Perplexity of crawling and pulling data from websites by circumventing blocks designed to protect against this activity. Perplexity has argued that its AI assistant is not crawling the web but accessing individual websites at a user’s request, and as such should not be subject to the same rules.
When people use AI agents such as Perplexity’s assistant to “go and read something on their behalf, Srinivas said, “that’s different from a web crawler” that downloads information and uses it to train a new AI model.
Perplexity, which raised $100 million at a $18 billion valuation last month, also made waves recently with a $34.5 billion offer to acquire Google Chrome, as the search giant faces a potential requirement to sell the web tool in US anti-trust proceedings. While some critics dismissed the bid as unserious, Srinivas said that Perplexity has “well-funded people who want to back us”.
“We have yet to hear back from Google,” he said.