Perplexity is one of the leading players in the new ecosystem of search engines powered by artificial intelligence, which is now reconsidering its advertising strategy. After having been one of the first companies to introduce advertisements within its product, the company has begun to progressively remove them since the end of last year, according to information collected by the Financial Times.

According to statements from a Perplexity executive during a meeting with the media, “a user needs to believe that they are receiving the best possible response to continue using the product and be willing to pay for it”. The problem, he adds, is that “with ads, the user would begin to doubt everything”which means that, for now, they do not consider advertising a priority avenue.

The decision puts Perplexity in a position closer to that of Anthropic than to those of OpenAI or Google within an increasingly explicit debate in the industry: can a conversational assistant be monetized with advertising without compromising its credibility?

Google has been integrating ads into its AI features for months, such as AI Mode or AI Overviews, and although Gemini remains without direct advertising, the company has indicated that it could be a natural step in the future. OpenAI, for its part, began testing ads on ChatGPT last week. Its CEO, Sam Altman, has defended that an advertising business would make the free version of the product sustainable.

Anthropic, however, has chosen the opposite position. In a recent manifesto, the company claimed that including ads in Claude would be incompatible with its goal of becoming “a genuinely useful assistant for work and deep thinking”. It even launched four ads during the Super Bowl ironicizing chatbot advertising.
The central argument is that, although the ads do not directly influence the responses generated by the model, they introduce an incentive to optimize for engagement – usage time and recurrence – metrics that are not necessarily aligned with real utility.

Giving up advertising at this time does not eliminate the need to generate income. Perplexity is therefore strengthening its sales team enterprise and targeting large corporations, financial professionals, doctors and senior managers as priority clients, according to Business Insider.
The goal is to build a revenue stream based on premium subscriptions and enterprise licenses, rather than relying on advertising inventory.

However, a company executive has suggested that they may reconsider the ads in the future, although he also stated that they may “we never need to resort to them”depending on how their business lines evolve.

Advertising is the model that has financed the expansion of the Internet for two decades. But AI assistants are more than just content feeds, because they produce responses interpreted as knowledge. If a user suspects that the response is conditioned by commercial interests, the erosion of trust can be immediate.

The dominant model is not decided yet. But it is beginning to become clear that trust is the most valuable, and most fragile, asset of conversational artificial intelligence.