Perplexity stops testing advertising

Perplexity is abandoning advertising, for now at least. The company believes sponsored placements — even labeled ones — risk undermining the trust on which its AI answer engine depends.

• Perplexity phased out the ads it began testing in 2024 and has no plans to bring them back, the Financial Times reported.
• The AI search company could revisit advertising or “never ever need to do ads,” the report said.

Why we care. If Perplexity remains ad-free, brands lose paid access to a fast-growing audience. The company previously reported that it gets 780 million monthly queries. With sponsored placements gone, brands have no way to get visibility inside Perplexity’s answers other than via organic citations.

What changed. Perplexity was one of the first AI search companies to test ads, placing sponsored answers beneath chatbot responses. It said at the time that ads were clearly labeled and didn’t influence outputs. Executives now say perception matters as much as policy.

• “A user needs to believe this is the best possible answer,” one executive said, adding that once ads appear, users may second-guess response integrity.

Meanwhile. Perplexity’s exit comes as other AI platforms experiment with ads.

• OpenAI is now testing ads in ChatGPT for free users, placing labeled sponsored results below answers.
• Google runs ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews within Search, though not in Gemini.
• Anthropic has publicly committed to keeping Claude ad-free.

Perplexity says subscriptions are its core business. It offers a free tier and paid plans from $20 to $200 per month. It has more than 100 million users and about $200 million in annualized revenue, according to executives.

• Perplexity also introduced shopping features, but doesn’t take a cut of transactions, another indication it’s cautious about revenue models that could create conflicts of interest.
• “We are in the accuracy business, and the business is giving the truth, the right answers,” one executive said.

The report. Perplexity drops advertising as it warns it will hurt trust in AI (subscription required)

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