“AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said as the company rolled out a new $42.5 million pool to pay publishers when their content shows up in its AI-powered search results.
The problem is not whether publishers should get paid. The problem is how. And here, Perplexity is avoiding the only sustainable solution, that is, straightforward licensing of content. This is a model its rivals are already embracing.
Instead, the $18 billion startup is experimenting with a subscription service called Comet Plus, where users pay $5 a month and publishers receive 80% of the revenue. Payouts occur when Comet’s AI browser cites an article, when its assistant reads a page on a user’s behalf, or when a user actually clicks through. The catch is obvious. This entire revenue-sharing model depends on Comet gaining traction with users. And that’s an enormous gamble. One that explains why, just last month, Perplexity made headlines with a $34.5 billion bid to buy Google Chrome, the world’s most widely used browser. “We have yet to hear back from Google,” Srinivas quipped. The logic behind that bid, unserious or not, is: without users, Comet Plus has no revenue to share.
Perplexity has presented Comet Plus as a new standard. Jessica Chan, its head of publisher partnerships, said the initiative grew directly from feedback, “Perplexity only succeeds if journalism succeeds. We’re really committed to building and funding more sustainable, thriving news ecosystems for the AI age”. But this is not the company’s first stab at placating publishers. It previously floated an ad revenue-sharing program. That was scrapped. Now it is subscription revenue.
Competitors have chosen a simpler path. OpenAI signed a licensing deal with News Corp. Amazon struck a similar agreement with the New York Times. Google is experimenting with NotebookLM and a search feature that lets users pick preferred outlets. All are versions of the same principle: license the content upfront.
The timing of Perplexity’s announcement coincides with legal trouble. Just days earlier, the company lost a bid to dismiss a copyright infringement suit brought by News Corp’s Dow Jones and the New York Post. Judge Katherine Failla ruled that New York courts could hear the case. Plaintiffs accused Perplexity of “engaging in massive freeriding on Plaintiffs’ protected content to compete against Plaintiffs for the engagement of the same news-consuming audience”. Other lawsuits are piling up. The New York Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, Nikkei, and Asahi Shimbun are all suing Perplexity for copyright infringement. The Japanese publishers are seeking ¥2.2 billion each in damages.
Globally, this is the front line of AI’s collision with journalism. Courts will decide whether AI companies can keep copying articles under the guise of “publicly available factual information,” as Perplexity has argued, or whether they must pay for rights.
Perspective matters. Perplexity’s valuation stands at $18-20 billion. Against that, $42.5 million, spread across multiple publishers, is not transformative. The real money is in the ecosystem Perplexity is building on top of publisher content. Comet is a browser, and also an AI assistant designed to summarize, read, and perform tasks with other people’s work. According to Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s communications head, “AI gives a lot more power to users, who don’t like spammy clickbait and never have”. That may be true. But publishers’ core worry is being reduced to sources for snippets, while the audience and subscription relationship shift to Perplexity.
Critics say the irony is that Perplexity doesn’t need to build convoluted revenue-sharing schemes at all. Licensing marketplaces already exist. Companies like AskNews Publisher, Tollbit, Dappier, and Datarade offer publisher content formatted for AI systems, with rights attached. “Our data marketplace partnerships allow us to tap into new AI-driven revenue streams… as audience traffic habits evolve,” Colin Benedict, chief innovation officer at Morgan Murphy Media told Editor & Publisher. This approach is working. Innovative local publishers are already monetizing their archives and reporting through these platforms.
Perplexity insists it is “committed to building and funding more sustainable, thriving news ecosystems for the AI age”. But the company’s actions suggest strategic uncertainty. From scraping controversies, to an abandoned ad model, to Comet Plus, to a speculative $34.5 billion Chrome bid, the throughline is not clarity. For a company of this size and ambition, it is striking how reluctant Perplexity has been to simply do the obvious: license content directly, at scale, like its rivals.
