Artificial intelligence systems need content to produce results, and they’ve been criticized for not paying the people who wrote and edited that content. Now, Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, is introducing Comet Plus. This new subscription tier will distribute revenue to publishing partners whenever readers use AI to glean or deliver journalistic content, the company said in a blog post on Monday.
In the AI age, high-quality information is key, and Perplexity contends that publishers should be compensated for bringing AI users that content. According to Bloomberg, the company has allotted $42.5 million for the partner program and is currently looking for publishing partners. The tier costs users $5 a month but will be included for free to those with a Perplexity Pro or Max subscription.
“To put it simply, AI gives a lot more power to users, who don’t like spammy clickbait and never have,” says Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, in a statement. “The right business model for the AI age should ensure publishers and journalists benefit from improving the internet.”
Perplexity says it’ll compensate publishers in three ways: via human visits, search citations and agent actions.
The first one is obvious: Whenever someone uses Perplexity to research content online, clicking out to a publishing partner will net some compensation. The second way is whenever Perplexity cites a piece of content in its AI summary, which will also activate revenue share. Lastly, whenever Perplexity’s AI visits a publisher’s website to do some task on behalf of the user, that’ll net compensation.
Comet Plus is a new program by Perplexity that shares revenue with publishers.
Comet is also the name of Perplexity’s new AI-powered web browser, which is currently being tested among a select group of users. Comet uses AI to summarize the websites you’re browsing and can perform tasks on your behalf.
With the rise of AI chatbots, publishers have become increasingly litigious about the use of their content. Because AI models are trained on online content, including material researched, written, edited, and funded by publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others, publishers feel they should be compensated. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against AI companies, including Perplexity and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
AI models need access to high-quality information to improve and continue being a one-stop shop for information. Publications are now inking licensing deals with AI companies to sell this content. Perplexity’s move expands that to include data crawling for AI training and agentic use cases.
