Perplexity Plans to Sell Ads on its Ai Search Platform. It is a Big Deal!

Perplexity plans to sell ads on its Ai search platform. This is a big deal!

In a conversation with AdWeek, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko stated that the company plans to introduce sponsored suggested questions by the end of this year.

Rather than appearing in the initial answer, ads will likely surface when users seek additional information. It reminds me of Quora Ads.

Perplexity could potentially compete with Google and other traditional search engines for a portion of the highly lucrative search ads market.

Bing Copilot is already showing ads while Google Search Generative Experience is still testing them. See screenshots.

But the ads I spotted on Bing Copilot looked quite lame, resembling contextual display ads more than search ads.

Conversely, the sponsored suggested questions on Perplexity might give advertisers more control over the specific phrases or keywords associated with their ads.

For now, neither Microsoft nor Google offer advertisers specific tools to manage and monitor Gen-Ai ads. Instead, they include them in their popular automated solutions such as Performance Max and Multimedia Ads.

So I'm curious to see what kind of ad platform Perplexity will develop!

I’ve used Perplexity as my main search engine for several months now and I couldn’t be happier. But I don’t think it will replace Google any time soon.
In fact, it serves a different purpose.

According to Ahrefs, the top five Google searches in the U.S. consist of single-word website names, such as "youtube", "amazon", and "facebook". It's clear that users are just looking to visit these sites, not to find information about the companies behind them. This behaviour will hardly be altered by Gen Ai.

Instead, Ai search engines such as Perplexity and You.com target users who are conducting in-depth research on specific topics or need quick answers to particular questions.

For instance, if you search for "how to take a screenshot on a Mac" on Google, you'll have to sift through numerous SEO-filled pages before finding a clear answer. However, if you do the same on Perplexity, you'll get the solution immediately.

To me, this latter scenario seems more favourable for ads, where advertisers can clearly address users' questions and needs.