Perplexity, the AI-powered search engine, is expanding its publisher program, with the LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and a dozen other news outlets signing up. Publishers will share in revenue generated by ads on Perplexity, and receive metrics to track their content’s performance — as long as they don’t withdraw.
“We would not be able to serve factual, valuable answers without news organizations continuing to report on different topics,” Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “We’re excited to welcome these new publishers to the program.”
Spanish-language media brand Pris Media, newspaper conglomerate Lee Enterprises, and The Independent are among the dozen publishers joining. Other new members include Blavity, NewsPicks, Minkabu Infonoid, Gear Patrol, MediaLab, DPReview, World History Encyclopedia, and RTL Germany brands NTV and Stern.
It’s not clear to what extent these publishers made their staff aware of the partnerships before they were revealed publicly. A source at LA Times told TechCrunch that reporters weren’t informed of the Perplexity deal, or heard only references to it in passing, and that the editorial department wasn’t given an opportunity to voice its opinions to leadership.
A source at Adweek said some of its staff were not informed or given a say either. One reporter learned about the deal from a press release.
“[Everyone’s] perplexed. That’s truly the best word for it,” the LA Times source said. “I don’t think anyone seems to have enough information to be positive or negative about it. Some people hadn’t heard of Perplexity, so [there’s] really just a lack of information to have any position on it. But I’m sure everyone will have thoughts once we know more.”
Notably absent from the new cohort is The New York Times, which in October sent Perplexity a cease and desist letter demanding the startup stop accessing its articles without permission. Dow Jones, which runs the Wall Street Journal and other newswire services, and The NY Post haven’t joined Perplexity’s program, either — they’re suing the company over what they’ve described as a “content kleptocracy.”
Perplexity has a complicated relationship with publishers. Its search engine uses AI to synthesize and summarize content, including news, from around the web. But the way in which Perplexity presents these summaries — and the company’s data-gathering tactics — remain points of contention.
This summer, Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing its paywalled content and subsequently threatened the company with legal action. Around the same time, Wired published a piece that found Perplexity’s platform was paraphrasing its own stories — sometimes inaccurately.
According to Copyleaks, a company building tech to detect AI-generated text, Perplexity was summarizing at least some paywalled news as recently as late October.
In a blog post responding to Dow Jones’ lawsuit, Perplexity argued that publishers wished its tech “didn’t exist” and that they would prefer “publicly reported facts are owned by corporations.” But the post avoided addressing whether Perplexity regurgitates content at a massive scale, as some allege, and then competes with publishers of that content for the same audience.
Perplexity asserts that it cites its sources, which it does do. The citations are sometimes erroneous, however.
In a move that’s unlikely to foster much goodwill with publishers, Perplexity is locking down the details of its program’s terms. This summer, the company told The Verge that the deals were “multiyear” with a “double-digit” percentage, and payments would be made for each article that Perplexity served to users. But when TechCrunch asked about the terms this week, a spokesperson said Perplexity “wasn’t sharing financial specifics.”
It could be that Perplexity is wary of making the terms public — publishers could use them as leverage in negotiations with its competitors. In October, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search, a rival AI-powered search tool, alongside its own publishing partners like The Atlantic, News Corp. and Vox Media.
Unlike Perplexity’s publisher program, OpenAI’s allows publishers to manage how their content appears in search results. Perplexity previously said it was working on content controls, but it gave no update on progress this morning.
As Perplexity’s program expands, the startup may face greater pressure from investors to recoup the costs. Perplexity is said to be raising $500 million in a deal that would value it at $9 billion. But its annual recurring revenue was just about $50 million as of October, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas appears to be optimistic. In a post on X on Wednesday, he said Perplexity is now serving around 20 million queries a day, up from 2.5 million a day at the beginning of the year.
