Google has been fighting off competitor search engines for more than two decades, and it’s remained the heavyweight champ all the while. However, a new age is dawning in the world of search engines, and Google might have some heavy competition. Perplexity is a new AI-powered search engine, and it will start showing sponsored search results.
The age of the AI-powered search engine is dawning, and that could cause millions of sites and companies to have to fade into the sunset. Why look through several pages and contribute to their ad revenue when you can just have the answers given to you? This is one question we asked when Google unveiled AI Overviews. Obviously, it’s going to have a massive effect on the companies that rely on Google.
Perplexity is working on sponsored search results
Perplexity isn’t much different from AI Overviews and the eventual OpenAI SearchGPT search engine. When you type in a search query, you’ll have an AI-generated answer fill the screen. Above that, you’ll see the sources that it used to generate the response. The sources aren’t pushed into a corner or hidden behind a sub-menu. Well, more specifically, one source takes up a bit of the screen. Off to the side, you’ll see a sub-menu with additional sources that you can look at.
However, it looks like Perplexity is taking a page from Google’s book. According to a new report, Perplexity will start surfacing sponsored results. When you search a query, there’s a section at the bottom of the response labeled “Related follow-up questions.” Well, in the future, companies will be able to pay to be featured as a question. These questions will be labeled as Sponsored, so users will know that they were paid for.
We’re certain that clicking on these sponsored questions will take the reader right to the company’s website. The ad revenue generated will be split between Perplexity and the company that sponsored the spot. We don’t know the ratio of money going to each.
This is part of a program to help publications…. but
This is a push to help publications flourish in this growing age of AI. The thing is that companies have already lost so much thanks to AI, and Perplexity wants to be a shining beacon of hope.
The company is developing a program where it will split ad revenue with companies. Companies will pay to have their posts sponsored on Perplexity, and their employees will get a year of Perplexity Pro. The thing is that the list of companies that will benefit from this is pretty short. Right now, it looks like Perplexity is partnering with companies like TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com. So, these major companies will benefit from this program at the start.
Perplexity plans to expand this to more companies, but the issue is that this seems to be based on a per-partnership basis. Perplexity can’t partner with all of the millions of sites across the internet that benefit from ad revenue from Google. A large portion of companies could be left out in the dust.
In any case, we’ll need to see if this does have a positive effect in the long run.
2024-08-03 15:08:23