Nvidia-backed Perplexity AI inks deal with publishers to put ads in search engine

Artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI, which is backed by Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and several other investors, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a deal with several publishers to split advertising revenue amid accusations of plagiarism by the tech company.

As part of its Perplexity Publishers’ Program, Perplexity is partnering with TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com to feature their content in response to user’s search queries. In conjunction, the publishers will get a cut of the ad revenue associated with the queries. The publishers will get a one-year subscription to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity’s developer tools.

“The Internet ecosystem is evolving, and we want this program to grow and adapt,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post. “We’re open to other types of collaborations with publishers in the future, such as bundled subscriptions, where users could pay a flat fee for both Perplexity Pro and subscriptions to participating publishers.”

“We structured this program to ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “We appreciate the publishers who have joined us for this program and provided us with valuable feedback about how it should operate. We have always believed that we can build a system where the whole Internet wins, and this is just the first step.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, told The Verge that “it’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero.”

Perplexity’s AI product, Pages, which lets users create reports, has been accused by both Forbes and Wired of plagiarism.

OpenAI creator ChatGPT has partnered with several media companies for training purposes.

In April, it was reported that Perplexity was planning to raise at least $250M, at a valuation in the range of $2.5B to $3B.