Nvidia-backed Perplexity later this quarter will allow brands to purchase "related follow-up questions" that will appear below the initial answer to user queries.

Perplexity will clearly label the "sponsored" post. The brand will pay Perplexity an undisclosed fee for every thousand user views of the sponsored question. When a publisher’s content is used in Perplexity’s answer to the sponsored question, it earns an undisclosed “double digit” percentage of ad revenue.

Six publishers were announced today, with a plan to announce another batch of publishing partners in August. "Our goal before the end of the year is to have 30 to 40 publishers in the program," a Perplexity spokesperson told Media Daily News. 

Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com are some of the publishers that are launching with the program. 

Time Chief Operating Officer Mark Howard told Perplexity that the program supports the publication's commitment to new technologies and platforms to provide trusted journalism for audiences.  

Partners will have free access to Perplexity's large language model (LLM) APIs and developer support, allowing publishers to create their own custom answer engine on their websites.

Visitors to participating publisher sites can ask questions and receive answers that cite only content from that publisher’s site. Technology that enables visitors to ask related questions will become available for direct integration into their stories.

Employees of publishers will have access to Perplexity's Enterprise Pro offering with enhanced data privacy and security capabilities for one year.

Nearly all AI platforms have of late experienced substantial increases in mobile and desktop monthly active users, according to data from Datos, a Semrush company.

ChatGPT has a user base that comes close to some of the other search incumbents. It is by far the largest of the five, experiencing a combined desktop and mobile web MAU growth of 25% between May 2023 and May 2024, but the total number of monthly active users of Perplexity increased 3.4x in the same time period.

Datos’ report — Customer Search Behavior: What’s Changing and What’s Not in the Age of AI — analyzes how generative AI influences consumer search behaviors

Perplexity worked with ScalePost.ai to streamline collaborations between content publishers. It also provides AI analytics for publishers.

The announcement comes days after OpenAI went public with its own AI web search tool now being tested with a small number of users.