Perplexity drops advertising, citing user trust

Perplexity is walking away from advertising. The AI search company is phasing out the ads it began testing in 2024 and has no current plans to bring them back, according to a Financial Times report.

What Perplexity sold

Perplexity announced its ad experiment on 12 November 2024. Ads took the form of sponsored follow-up questions, labelled "sponsored", shown beside answers. Early partners included Indeed, Whole Foods and Universal McCann. The stated aim was to fund revenue sharing with publishers, because "subscriptions alone do not generate enough revenue".

Why it stopped

Executives told the FT that advertising undermines the product:

"The challenge with advertising is that it makes users suspicious of everything."

Another said the company has to believe "removing ads is the best answer" if it wants users to keep paying. The FT put Perplexity's annual revenue at about $200 million, mostly from subscriptions, with more than 100 million users.

The bigger picture

The split between AI platforms is now clear:

• OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in January 2026.
• Google shows ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but not in the Gemini app.
• Anthropic has said it will not put ads in Claude.
• Perplexity has now joined the no-ads camp, at least for now.

What it means for marketers

There is no paid route into Perplexity answers. Visibility there is organic: being cited as a source. That means crawlable pages, clear factual content and third-party coverage that Perplexity can quote.