Hey, Perplexity, Don’t Get Confounded

We have a suggestion to curb bloating the AI search engine with ads.

Written by Brook Schaaf

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Have you used Perplexity.ai? It’s incredible. This AI-powered search engine provides succinct, impressively accurate answers — complete with citations, so you can double-check the sources yourself. No surprise that its traffic has more than tripled; Similarweb data shows 51.3M visitors compared to 15.1M at the same time last year. 

There’s buzz about a pitch deck on advertising possibilities. (No holier-than-thou attitude here.) Perplexity was unable to provide an actual copy of the deck, but it did write that ad formats, to be launched as early as Q4, would include integrated ads within queries, sponsorship of related questions beneath answers, branded explanatory text, and display ads with CPMs “north of $50.” (Hosts of the most recent Digiday podcast were agape at such a high number.)

This does not sound like a great user experience. It’s unclear that textual keywords would have any smooth insertion point, banner ads anywhere clutter up the page (sorry, but you know it’s true), and there is no pre- or mid-roll spot for a video. Moreover, how would the ad content even be selected? The revenue-generating genius of Google’s AdWords is largely keyword matching; of Facebook, audience matching, and of Amazon, a sort of combination of both. SearchGPT would seem to face the same problem.

So what’s the solution? Affiliate marketing, of course. Any commercially relevant term — whether it be brand, category, or product — will have a variety of affiliate programs globally to direct traffic to, making it very suitable for a property with 20% of its traffic coming from the United States and no more than 8% from any other country. 

True, an internal ad network might have higher dollar yields, but there’s nothing stopping Perplexity from pursuing both courses as long as it stays clearheaded.