AI search engine Perplexity saw a significant increase in users last month. However, the startup remains far behind market leader Google. The integration of AI could permanently change the search engine industry.
AI startup Perplexity experienced strong growth last month. According to Dmitry Shevelenko, Chief Business Officer at Perplexity, the search engine answered about 250 million questions. In contrast, 500 million queries were processed throughout 2023, Shevelenko told the Financial Times.
Perplexity uses artificial intelligence to answer search queries, promising more precise and contextually relevant results than conventional keyword-based searches. Industry giants like Google and Microsoft now also offer AI-powered search functions, but so far have had worse press than better search experiences. Recently, OpenAI has also entered the market with SearchGPT.
Despite the growth, Perplexity remains far behind market leader Google. The search engine giant has dominated the market for years with an estimated global market share of over 90 percent and handles about 8.5 billion queries per day.
Growth shows that AI is changing search
Nevertheless, Perplexity's growth could be an indicator that users are increasingly looking for alternatives that use modern AI technologies - whether they find them at Google, OpenAI, or Perplexity. The integration of AI into internet search could permanently change user behavior and call established business models into question.
On its way to becoming a big name in search, Perplexity faces a big challenge - Google, of course. Google has enormous financial resources and amounts of data that allow it to continually improve its own AI capabilities. For example, after initial problems, Google has now brought the multimodal Gemini model to the top of benchmarks.
Perplexity is also under criticism because the search engine crawls content on the web and displays it in search or on user-generated "Pages" - causing the originators of the sources to lose traffic. In response, Perplexity recently launched the "Perplexity Publishers' Program," in which content from selected publishers is displayed more prominently in search results and the publishers share in the advertising revenue in return. However, smaller publishers or websites - as with Google - are left empty-handed.
