Perplexity announced that it plans to double-down on its efforts to grow its subscriptions business and enterprise sales and move away from pursuing an ad-supported model. Back in 2024, I reported that the AI search company began experimenting with ads, but those efforts ultimately stalled.
An unnamed Perplexity executive told FT that “the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything… which is why we don’t see it as a fruitful thing to focus on right now.” Instead the company will focus on producing results that users are “willing to pay for,” particularly targeting high-powered users like finance professionals, lawyers, doctors, and CEOs.
So instead of making an advertising play, Perplexity is betting that rich people use different search tools than the rest of us? They might want to revisit that thesis.
A few weeks ago I reported on the Anthropic Super Bowl ad that got Sam Altman all riled up. The commercial features a man asking ChatGPT, which is depicted by a middle-aged blonde therapist, for advice on how to talk to his mom. The woman starts by offering some decent advice like “start by listening” or “go on a nature walk.” Then she suddenly pivots into an advertisement, recommending that he find emotional connection with other older women on a fictitious dating website called Golden Encounters. The commercial finishes by saying “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
The Anthropic ad seems to have drawn a line in the sand between AI companies with ads and AI companies without. Perplexity has since crossed sides, leaving OpenAI alone as the sole bad guy running ads (or at least that’s how Anthropic is attempting to position them).
Google currently displays ads within AI Search and AI Overviews, but has not yet integrated advertising into its Gemini chatbot. Though I imagine that it’s only a matter of time before they do, and I wouldn’t expect anything different from the king of online advertising.
