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Perplexity AI Pledges Payouts to Publishers Through New Browser Program

By  |  August 25, 2025

Perplexity AI  is launching a new initiative that will allow publishers to earn money directly from how their content is used within its products, a move designed to ease tensions with media organizations over the company’s use of their work. According to Bloomberg, the startup has committed $42.5 million for distribution to participants in the program.

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    Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the plan is intended to ensure that publishers benefit financially from AI-driven search. “AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” he said. The company’s new approach comes as the media industry has clashed with artificial intelligence platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, which many publishers argue divert traffic away from their websites. Per Bloomberg, Jessica Chan, who leads publisher partnerships at Perplexity, argued that relying on page clicks is “an old model” and described the company’s plan as a way to establish “a new standard for compensation.”

    The program is tied to Perplexity’s Comet browser and its AI assistant. Publishers will earn revenue when their work is surfaced in search results, drives web traffic, or assists in task completion. Funding for the payouts will come from Comet Plus, a new $5-per-month subscription that grants users access to a curated selection of publisher content. Publishers will retain 80% of the subscription revenue, with Perplexity taking the remaining share. According to Bloomberg, this model contrasts with the multimillion-dollar licensing deals struck between larger AI firms and major outlets, making Perplexity one of the first AI startups to tie payouts directly to content usage frequency.

    Read more: Perplexity Seeks Chrome Takeover as US Weighs Breaking Up Google

    Although Perplexity did not disclose which publishers are already onboard, the company has previously partnered with Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Fortune on ad-revenue-sharing initiatives. Still, the startup is also facing resistance. Forbes and Condé Nast have accused it of misusing content in AI-generated summaries without consent, and Perplexity recently failed in an attempt to dismiss a copyright case brought by Dow Jones and the New York Post. “We are confident AI companies will win all of these lawsuits,” company spokesperson Jesse Dwyer said, noting the goal is to clarify the law quickly so “everyone can benefit from AI.”

    Beyond publishing disputes, the company has also been criticized by Cloudflare Inc., which accused Perplexity of bypassing protective blocks to scrape website data. Srinivas has pushed back on those claims, saying its AI assistant does not engage in traditional web crawling but instead retrieves information from websites at the request of users. He argued that this activity differs significantly from the large-scale data collection employed to train AI systems.

    Perplexity, which raised $100 million last month at a valuation of $18 billion, has also made headlines with a bold $34.5 billion offer to acquire Google’s Chrome browser, a deal floated as regulators weigh whether Google should divest the product. While some industry observers dismissed the proposal as unrealistic, Srinivas maintained that the company has serious financial backers. “We have yet to hear back from Google,” he added.

    Source: Bloomberg