Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Everyone is probably already aware of this, but it was only a matter of time before advertising came to AI chatbots. Perplexity seems aware of the problems with this, and is going to try to mitigate it. We’ll see. I suspect the game theory will drive a race to the bottom similar to social media.
Although, powerful open source models may be disruptive enough that advertising in AI LLMs doesn’t have the influence like it does in social media. Imagine if nostr and twitter started at the same time and nostr didn’t have to fight the network effect of most people having their social graph in FB, twitter, IG, etc.
To fully deliver on our mission to spark the world’s curiosity, we need to invest in building not just a beloved product, but a robust and self-sustaining business. That’s why starting this week, we will begin experimenting with ads on Perplexity.
Before getting into the details, we want to highlight our guiding principle: the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers. Users come to Perplexity for a more efficient, uncluttered, and unbiased search experience, and that isn’t changing.
Ads will appear in the US to start and will be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned to the side of an answer. Here’s an example of how they will appear: