Perplexity AI plans to start running ads in fourth quarter as AI-assisted search gains popularity
Perplexity AI logo is seen in this illustration taken January 4, 2024.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Perplexity AI, the artificial intelligence startup that’s been embroiled in controversy due to accusations of plagiarizing content from media outlets, plans to start running ads on its search app in the fourth quarter, CNBC has learned.
The company, which specializes in AI-assisted search, is circulating a pitch deck, promoting the app’s reach and increasing usage. The company says its app has been downloaded more than 2 million times and has 230 million monthly users, while U.S. queries have increased eightfold in the past year, according to the presentation, which was viewed by CNBC.
Perplexity raised new funding in April that valued the company at more than $1 billion, doubling its valuation from three months earlier. But the app’s increasing popularity has highlighted concerns surrounding the ways the company surfaces content from other sources.
Forbes reported in June that it found a plagiarized version of one of its stories on Perplexity with no reference to the media outlet other than a small “F” logo at the bottom of the page. Weeks later, Wired said it also found evidence of Perplexity plagiarizing Wired stories, and reported that an IP address “almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range” visited its parent company’s websites more than 800 times in a three-month span.
The company told CNBC that, following the allegations, it made changes to how Perplexity’s Pages feature cites sources and also made updates so that its responses are better at citing outlets directly within the generated copy.
Last month, Perplexity debuted a revenue sharing model, giving publishers an opportunity to make money through the company’s search engine. Any time a user asks a question and Perplexity generates ad revenue from citing an article in its answer, Perplexity will share a percentage of that revenue with the publisher.
Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress were among the first to join the company’s “Publishers Program.” Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, told CNBC in a July interview that if three articles from one publisher were used in one answer, the partner would receive “triple the revenue share.” He said the company had been working on the feature since January and that its goal is to have 30 publishers enrolled by the end of the year.
With advertising, Perplexity will follow a model called CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. CPM prices will be more than $50, the source said. Search marketing firm Semrush wrote in a blog post last year that display ads on desktop typically have CPMs of around $2.50, while mobile videos have rates of about $11.10.
Perplexity said in its pitch deck that its key advertising categories initially would include topics like technology, health and pharmaceuticals, arts and entertainment, finance, and food and beverage. Advertisers will be able to sponsor “related questions” below answers and buy display ads to the right or a Perplexity-generated answer.
According to the presentation, more than eight in 10 Perplexity users have an undergraduate degree, while three in 10 are in a “senior leadership position,” and 65% are in “high-income white-collar professions,” such as medicine, law and software engineering.
AI-assisted search has been viewed by investors as one of Google’s key risks, as it potentially changes the way consumers access information online. OpenAI, which started the generative AI craze in late 2022 with ChatGPT, introduced a search engine last month called SearchGPT. In May, Google launched “AI Overviews” in search, allowing users to see a quick summary of answers at the top of results.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.
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