There will finally not be an ad in Perplexity

Advertising has become a thorn in the side of major AI players who are trying to monetize their free users. OpenAI has thus started displaying banners in the United States in ChatGPT (including for Go subscribers), but for its rivals, this is not the path to follow. Anthropic has strongly stated that the ads would never pollute Claude's results, while jokingly mocking OpenAI along the way.

Ads, a grain of sand in the machine of AI

On its part, Perplexity has simply ended its "sponsored answers" test launched in 2024. The startup had been the first in its field to set up such a program, which involved displaying advertisements beneath search results. It's over, and the reason is simple: users must trust the bot's answers.

« A user must believe that it is the best possible answer, to continue using the product and be willing to pay for it », explains a company executive to the Financial Times. Even though the ads in Perplexity were clearly labeled, and even though the company assured that they had no impact on its service's results, there was a risk of confusion.

« The problem with advertising, is that a user simply starts to doubt everything… which is why we don't consider it as a relevant area to prioritize at the moment », the executive continues. It's a difficult problem to solve, and OpenAI obviously doesn't have the solution since its own advertisements largely follow the same principle as those of Perplexity.

Google already has ads in the AI Mode of search results, as well as in the AI Overviews summaries. But there are none in the Gemini bot (until when?). At Perplexity, we now want to focus on the reliability of results. « Our activity consists of providing the truth, the good answers », confirms another executive. It is not therefore a question of completely excluding ads in the future, but they remain out of sync with what users want for now.

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Source : FT