Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that promises to provide accurate information to user queries. It uses information from multiple sources to generate the relevant answer. Now the company has decided to share revenue with publishers if their content is used to generate the response to a query.
This move came two months after Perplexity was accused of scraping content from websites without permission. Perplexity scrapers also ignore robots.txt.
The company has also confirmed the name of web publishers it will be paying as a part of multi-year deals. These publishers are Automattic, Der Spiegel, Entrepreneur, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, and TIME. These colonies will get Perplexity’s APIs and developer support. They can also create their own custom answer engines for adding to their website.
OpenAI has promised its media partners a preferential treatment, but Perplexity won’t do that.
This is a welcome move because AI chatbots and AI search engines have significantly impacted web publishers and bloggers. Many websites have seen a decline in traffic in recent years because several users have turned to AI for quick answers and summaries. Google search has also added an AI overview to provide quick answer to users. So, users don’t need to click on different links in search results to get information. These AI chatbots and AI search engines have been trained using data from various websites without seeking permission from them. This has created a big challenge for Web publishers, bloggers, and journalists who work hard to publish content on their websites.
Now that Perplexity has decided to share revenue with publishers, I hope other AI companies will also follow the same ethics.
