Perplexity’s ad revolution begins

To capitalize on its growing popularity, Perplexity—the AI search engine, backed by Jeff Bezos—will start monetizing its search platform by selling ad space. The app has been downloaded over 200M times, gets 230M search queries each month, and is now worth $1B (double what it was worth three months ago).

According to a pitch deck that’s been doing the rounds amongst advertisers, Perplexity is targeting advertisers within the technology, health, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, finance, food, and beverage industries, inviting them to either sponsor “related questions”, which sit underneath the search results or buy display ad space, which sits to the right of the results.

This comes after Perplexity launched its publisher program last month, which is a revenue-sharing scheme that sees Perplexity give publishers—like the TIMES and Fortune—a percentage of the ad revenue earned, each time they’re cited in the AI-generated results. For example, if three articles from one publisher were cited in an answer, the publisher would get 3x the revenue share.

But if Perplexity wants its search ad scheme to take off, it’ll have to repair some of the damage done to its reputation after Forbes and Wired recently accused it of plagiarism because it failed to reference the publications in its search results.