AI search engine Perplexity.ai plans to give select publishers a cut of its advertising revenue. The content of these publishers will appear more prominently in search results. However, a sustainable model for an "AI Internet" is still lacking, putting media diversity at risk.
Perplexity.ai announced its "Perplexity Publishers' Program," aiming to highlight content from chosen publishers in search results. In exchange, these publishers will receive a double-digit percentage of Perplexity's ad revenue when ads appear alongside their cited content. The first publishers to join will keep their percentage even if Perplexity lowers rates later, according to Semafor.
Advertising is set to launch this quarter. Brands can pay to place specific follow-up questions in the answer engine interface and on Perplexity Pages. Publishers' sales teams will also be able to sell ad space on the search engine itself.
Participating publishers will get access to Perplexity's online LLM APIs and developer support to add more AI features to their journalism products.
Before the program's announcement, Perplexity faced criticism for copying content from media outlets like Forbes, CNBC, and Bloomberg, sometimes word-for-word, for its Perplexity Pages feature without proper attribution.
Perplexity says it planned the publisher program before the controversy. Some publishers backed out of the partnership before launch, fearing internal backlash after the critical reports.
OpenAI and Perplexity decide which media benefit
Perplexity's approach is similar to that of competitor OpenAI, which also makes deals with select publishers to favor them in its chatbot and experimental AI search, SearchGPT.
If OpenAI's or Perplexity's products are successful, these companies will decide which media will benefit from partnerships, traffic, and advertising revenue - and which will be left out, potentially disappearing from the market.
The more important these platforms become, the more control they can exert over publishers and ad prices. Smaller, independent publishers that are not selected as "preferred" partners are at a massive disadvantage in this scenario. Google shows how a dominant technology platform can influence journalism. Services like SearchGPT and Perplexity are even more intrusive than Google.
AI search engines threaten media diversity
This trend threatens media diversity and creates a classic prisoner's dilemma for publishers. For AI search engines to be truly successful, they must make the Web obsolete. As more publishers join AI search engines, the pressure on those still on the "traditional web" to join increases.
Publishers who are now joining these programs and supporting AI search platforms should understand their role. They're helping a few tech companies exploit economic weakness or uncertainty to decide what content users will see and which media will ultimately survive. This makes publishers' own presence less important, and perhaps even unnecessary, at some point in the future.
To ensure media diversity in the long term, new approaches for an "AI Internet" are needed that fairly consider the interests of all stakeholders and give a chance to smaller, independent publishers.
