Perplexity AI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with news publishers when its chatbot surfaces their content in response to a user query, a move that appears designed to assuage critics that have accused the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. 

Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s head of business, told TechCrunch that the company was actually exploring the program in January, before publishers started leveling accusations. The business case for the publisher program was self-preservation: if Perplexity is going to continue to surface accurate answers to user queries, it will need journalists to continue producing new facts about the world. 

“How do we align ourselves with publishers?” said Shevelenko. “We’re not cannibalizing publishers or competing with them, but we need to do our part to make sure that there are these vibrant and diverse business models and revenue streams.”

And as generative AI continues to change the way people search, publishers are looking for new ways to monetize. 

Perplexity’s first batch of publishing partners include Automattic, Der Spiegel, Entrepreneur, Fortune, The Texas Tribune and TIME. As part of the multi-year deals, the publishers will get access to Perplexity’s APIs and developer support so they can create their own custom answer engines on their sites. They’ll also get access for all employees to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro offering with enhanced data privacy and security capabilities.

Perplexity hasn’t started displaying ads on its platform yet; that’ll come in the next few months. Shevelenko said the startup has lined up “top tier brands across every major consumer and B2B category.” So, for example, if a user is asking Perplexity questions about when to visit Tokyo, ads for brands related to travel might surface. And any money Perplexity makes from those ads, it’ll share with publishers whose content is used to answer those queries.  

Perplexity wouldn’t divulge details of the ad-revenue share, but Shevelenko said it would be “double digit” percentage points. 

Other media outlets — like The Atlantic, News Corp, The Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith, Axel Springer and Vox Media — have signed licensing and product deals with OpenAI in recent months, despite many of the journalists at those publications openly criticizing what they perceive as OpenAI’s theft of their content to train its AI models. 

“I think user behavior is going to drive a lot of this,” Michael Frazier, VP of data and operations at Entrepreneur Media, told TechCrunch. He noted that social media and Google Search taught him that “you have to meet your users where they want to be met.”

Frazier noted that his team at Entrepreneur is in the process of building a tool that will let users interact with the publication’s content in a more interactive way, something that Perplexity’s APIs will help with. 

Perplexity works with ScalePost.ai, a platform that enables collaborations between publishers and AI companies and provides AI analytics for publishers, like how Perplexity cites their content.

“One of the things we’re looking forward to getting more information on is user intent and user behavior and how and where they’re finding us,” continued Frazier. “That will be really valuable and help give us insight into how we can better support our readers.”

When asked about whether Frazier is concerned about having the Entrepreneur brand linked with potentially incorrect answers to user queries — most AI chatbots have a tendency to hallucinate, and Perplexity is no exception — the executive said that it’s always a concern, but he thinks Perplexity is taking the necessary steps to limit hallucinations. 

Perplexity said the publishers in its program won’t get preferential treatment for search queries, something OpenAI has promised its own media partners. When asked about how often users click through to an article that Perplexity cites in response to a user query, Shevelenko said click-through rates aren’t really the point of this program.

“For the first time, a tech platform is actually giving publishers revenue share out the gate, and we think that’s powerful,” he said. “The reason we’re doing something that Google never did is we don’t think the main value we bring to publishers is traffic, and I think it would be disingenuous for us to claim otherwise.” 

The main value as Shevelenko sees it is through its ad revenue share and access to Perplexity’s APIs and Pro subscription.

Despite the trend toward making nice with AI companies, not all publishers are willing to go quietly. The New York Times, Raw Story, AlterNet and The Intercept have all sued OpenAI for allegedly using copyrighted works by journalists to train ChatGPT without properly crediting or citing the sources.

Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, earlier this month sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, according to The Information. The publisher demanded that Perplexity stop using its publications’ content in search results, a move that might have been informed by a recent Wired report that found Perplexity pulled content from web pages when provided a URL of that page, even when publishers had specifically asked AI companies not to do so. 

Forbes also sent a similar letter to Perplexity after accusing the startup of plagiarizing one of its news articles in its beta Perplexity Pages feature. 

Perplexity has neither ceased nor desisted, and instead invites those publishers to join its publisher program.

“We’re excited to partner with them,” said Shevelenko.