Perplexity Issues Checks to Publishers After Plagiarism Accusations

Perplexity is launching a program that will allow it to share advertising revenue with publishing partners in response to weeks of plagiarism accusations.

Perplexity’s “Publisher Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including such substantial names as Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, entrepreneur, The Texas Tribuneand Automattic (which includes WordPress.com but no Tumblr). Under the program, when Perplexity features content from those publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the advertising revenue. Publishing partners will also receive a free one-year subscription to Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro tier and access to Perplexity’s developer tools, as well as insights through Scalepost.ai, a modern AI startup that helps secure partnerships between AI companies and publishers, such as how often their articles appear in search queries.

Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko declined to provide the exact terms of the deal, but said the revenue split is a multi-year deal with “double-digit percentages” that is consistent across all publishers, with particularly favorable terms for early adopters. Perplexity spokeswoman Sara Platnick added that payments are made on a per-source basis, meaning publishers are paid for each article used in the responses. The program will temporarily provide publishers with cash advances on revenue as Perplexity builds a long-term advertising model. The advances are not a royalty on content, like OpenAI’s deals.

“It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero,” Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told me in a direct message. The publishing deal doesn’t include WordPress.org, but Automattic will send payments to WordPress.com’s direct customers. “The amount, I don’t know! Probably a small amount to start with, because they’re not generating a lot of revenue right now, but if Perplexity is the next Google, which I think it has a chance to be, those numbers could become significant, and we want to help publishers get paid in any way we can.”

This modern program comes a month after Forbes the editor decided that the paid material in the publication was plagiarism in Perplexity’s modern product, Pages, an AI-powered tool that lets users create reports or articles based on suggestions. The AI-generated version Forbes the story, along with the AI-generated Perplexity podcast, was then sent to subscribers via a push notification on a mobile device, Forbes reported. Wire Then an investigation was published found that Perplexity’s AI “paraphrased WIRED articles and sometimes summarized them inaccurately and with minimal attribution.” Forbes since then he has been threatening to take legal action against Perplexity.

Shevelenko told me the company began working on the program in January, long before the scandal broke, saying the team drew inspiration from X’s ad revenue-sharing program. Perplexity had planned to launch the program last month amid the drama but decided to hold off until now, he said. I asked him if it was a well-planned apology tour or just a stopgap to head off lawsuits. “We don’t want people to say bad things about us more than we do, so we don’t get sued,” Shevelenko said.

Shevelenko says it’s “not great” that people think Perplexity is plagiarizing the work of journalists, especially as an “aspirational consumer brand.” He also thinks the accusation isn’t entirely fair, saying people were “cheating” the service’s AI to get these plagiarized results. Still, scraping and reprinting content doesn’t seem like a moral issue to Perplexity. Shevelenko said, “There are complexities of fair use and copyright law where we feel like we’re, you know, clearly within those boundaries.”

In Perplexity’s case, whether it’s a way to make amends or not, the startup seems determined to create a long-term infrastructure to pay publishers for their content as long as the company exists. Shevelenko said the same thing: “Of course, I don’t consider that scenario. But let’s say Perplexity dies and goes under. You don’t lose anything, right? And if we’re successful, you ride that growth.”

AI-powered search is more pricey than classic search, so Perplexity needs to move quickly to cover the computational costs. In May startup raised $250 million at a valuation of $3 billion. “We need advertising to be successful because it will be our main business model,” Shevelenko said.

Paying publishers only adds to costs, and Perplexity knows that’s not the norm for a search tool. “Our investors, by the way, don’t like us doing this because they say, ‘Oh, we want you to have the same margin profile as Google,’” Shevelenko said, adding that Perplexity can’t compete with Google by mimicking their strategies. Instead, he says, the company wants to focus on building profitable businesses by forming alliances with media outlets through creating the right long-term structures, such as sharing ad revenue.

There is also the looming threat of OpenAI, which just announced a prototype of its AI-powered search product, SearchGPT, with its own publishing partners including Corp News, AtlanticAND Edge‘s parent company, Vox Media. It appears that OpenAI has also reviewed Perplexity’s bugs. In the announcement, the company said that publishers will be able to “manage how they appear in OpenAI search features” and can opt out of having their content used to train OpenAI models and still appear in search results.

Shevelenko said Perplexity is “happy to give publishers full control” only “to the extent that it doesn’t make the product ugly.” For now, offering that control is “a work in progress.” Crucially, Perplexity wants to avoid giving publishers the ability to change their response.

It seems that AI companies will continue to utilize publishers’ content, whether they agree with it or not. The business side of the media industry seems to believe that accepting money, rather than laying off workers to afford lengthy legal battles, is the best option at the moment. CEO Atlanticwhich recently entered into a deal with OpenAI, said in an episode of the program Edge‘S Decoder that they weighed up all the benefits of working together against the costs of the lawsuit and how much they could get out of it, “and then made a choice.”

So if Perplexity wants to write a check to publishers for using their content, I think it’s good, honestly. But it doesn’t answer many questions, such as what this means for publishers who aren’t getting a check or whether the deals will provide significant resources for newsrooms. With technology on the rise, backed by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley, it seems media outlets don’t have much choice.