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Perplexity AI will soon begin sharing ad revenue with news publishers, and when its chatbot appears for their content in response to user queries, the move appears to be an attempt to appease critics who accuse the startup of plagiarism and unethical web scraping.

Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's head of business, told TechCrunch that the company had been exploring the project in January before publishers began to point fingers. The business rationale for the publisher's plan is self-preservation: if Perplexity is to continue to provide accurate answers to user queries, it needs journalists to continue to provide new facts about the world.

"How do we align with publishers?" Severenko said. "We're not going to cannibalize publishers and we're not going to compete with them, but we need to do our part to make sure there are these dynamic, diverse business models and revenue streams."

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

Perplexity's first publishing partners include Automattic, Der Spiegel, Entrepreneur, Fortune, Texas Tribune and Time. As part of a multi-year agreement, these publishers will receive Perplexity's application programming interface (API) and developer support, which will allow them to create their own custom answer engines on their websites. All of their employees will also receive Perplexity's Enterprise Pro product, which comes with enhanced data privacy and security features.

Perplexity hasn't started displaying ads on its platform yet, which will happen in the coming months. Shevelenko said the startup has found "top brands" in "every major consumer and B2B category". So, for example, if a user asks Perplexity when to travel to Tokyo, a travel-related brand ad will appear. Any money Perplexity makes from these ads will be shared with publishers whose content is used to answer these questions.

Perplexity would not disclose details of the share of ad revenue, but Shevilenko said it would be a "double-digit" percentage.

In recent months, other media outlets, such as The Atlantic, News Corp, Financial Times, DotDash Meredith, Axel Springer, and Vox Media, have also signed licensing and product agreements with OpenAI, although many journalists from these publications have publicly criticized OpenAI for misappropriating their content to train its AI models.

Michael Frazier, vice president of data and operations at Entrepreneur Media, told TechCrunch, "I think user behavior is going to be a big part of the drive. He noted that social media and Google search have told him that "you have to satisfy users where they want to be satisfied."

Fraser noted that his Entrepreneur team is developing a tool that allows users to interact with the publication's content in a more interactive way, and that Perplexity's API will help with that.

Perplexity has partnered with ScalePost.ai ScalePost.ai a platform that facilitates publishers to collaborate with AI companies, providing publishers with AI analytics, such as how Perplexity cites their content.

Frazier continued, "We look forward to getting more information about user intent and user behavior, and how and where they found us. "It's going to be very valuable and help us gain insight into how we can better support our readers.

When asked if Fraser was concerned about the Entrepreneur brand being linked to potentially incorrect answers to user inquiries (most AI chatbots have a tendency to hallucinate, and Perplexity is no exception), the executive said that this is always a problem, but he believes Perplexity is doing the necessary steps to limit the hallucinations.

Perplexity says publishers in its project won't get preferential treatment in search queries, and OpenAI has promised that to its own media partners. When asked about the user click-through rate of articles that Perplexity cites in response to user queries, Shevelenko said click-through rates aren't what the project is really about.

"This is the first time that a technology platform has really offered publishers a revenue share from the start, and we think that's strong," he said. "We're doing what Google has never done because we don't think the main value we bring to publishers is traffic, and I think it's dishonest if we don't say that."

According to Shevelenko, the main value lies in the ad revenue share and access to the Perplexity API and Pro subscriptions.

Despite the tendency to be friendly with AI companies, not all publishers are willing to remain silent. The New York Times, Raw Story, AlterNet, and The Intercept have all sued OpenAI, accusing it of using a journalist's copyrighted work to train ChatGPT without properly attributing or citing the source.

Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker, Vogue and Wired, sent a termination letter to Perplexity earlier this month, according to The Information. The publisher's request for Perplexity to stop using its publication's content in search results may have been inspired by a recent Wired report that found Perplexity extracting content from web pages without obtaining web page URLs, even though publishers explicitly asked AI companies not to do so.

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

Perplexity neither stopped nor discontinued, but invited these publishers to join its publisher program.

"We are very happy to work with them," Severenko said. " 

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