San Francisco: AI startup Perplexity AI Inc. has announced a new revenue-sharing initiative that will allow publishers to earn money when their content is accessed through the company’s Comet browser and AI-powered search platform.
The move comes as the media industry intensifies its pushback against AI firms for using journalism without compensation.
Under the program, Perplexity has set aside $42.5 million to be distributed among participating publishers.
Content creators will receive revenue when their articles drive web traffic via the Comet browser, show up in user search queries, or are used by Comet’s AI assistant to complete tasks.
“AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “So we think this is actually the right solution, and we're happy to make adjustments along the way.”
The initiative will be funded through Comet Plus, a $5 monthly subscription service similar to Apple News+, giving users access to curated content from partner outlets. Publishers will retain 80% of subscription revenue, with Perplexity keeping the remaining 20%.
Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships, said the goal was to modernise how publishers are compensated. “The traditional model where media outlets rely on web traffic and clicks is an old model. We just want to create a new standard for compensation,” she explained.
The announcement comes as AI companies face growing criticism — and lawsuits — over the use of copyrighted journalism. Perplexity has previously been accused by Forbes, Condé Nast, and others of summarising news content without consent.
Last week, the company lost its bid to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by News Corp.’s Dow Jones and the New York Post.
Perplexity has defended its technology, arguing that its assistant retrieves information from websites only when requested by users, unlike traditional crawlers that harvest bulk data for training AI models. “When people use AI agents such as Perplexity’s assistant to ‘go and read something on their behalf,’ that’s different from a web crawler,” Srinivas said.
The startup, which recently raised $100 million at a valuation of $18 billion, has also drawn headlines with a surprise $34.5 billion offer to acquire Google’s Chrome browser. While some critics dismissed the bid as unrealistic, Srinivas insisted the proposal was backed by serious investors: “We have yet to hear back from Google,” he said.
Perplexity has previously partnered with outlets such as Time, The Los Angeles Times, and Fortune on ad revenue-sharing projects, and is currently in talks with other publishers to join its new program.