Perplexity Ads

One page trips up almost every other write-up on this subject: perplexity.ai/enterprise/use-cases/advertising, which is titled “Perplexity for advertising” and is not a way to buy placements. It is Perplexity’s AI subscription sold to ad agencies as a research tool, pitched on “Validate your strategy with deep research” and “Get pitch-ready ideas in seconds”, with “Contact us” running into Enterprise sales. If a competitor page tells you Perplexity has an advertising page, this is what they found.

One caution about method, too. Perplexity’s own site blocks automated requests, so a page returning an error to a script proves nothing about whether it exists. Everything on this page was checked against the archived record rather than against a failed fetch.

1. August 2024
   Perplexity’s sales deck reaches advertisers and Adweek publishes it. Digiday reports CPMs “north of $50”, attributed to a source inside the company rather than to the deck.
2. 12 November 2024
   Ads launch. Perplexity’s own post calls it an experiment, US only, in two formats, and names Indeed, Whole Foods Market, Universal McCann and PMG as first partners. TechCrunch and others cover it the same day.
3. 18 November 2024
   Six days later, Perplexity launches its Merchant Program and draws a hard line: the shopping cards “aren’t sponsored”, and the programme is “distinct from and unrelated to Perplexity’s new sponsored questions ad products”.
4. May 2025
   Half a year in, Digiday reports that buyers want scale and that no return-on-investment data has been shared.
5. September 2025
   Perplexity’s ads chief departs. Its communications chief tells Digiday, on the record, that ads are under 0.01% of revenue and that fewer than 0.5% of advertisers who asked to run have been allowed to.
6. October 2025
   At Advertising Week New York, Perplexity says it has stopped accepting new advertisers, and that ads will not go into its Comet browser, “at least for now”.
7. February 2026
   The Financial Times reports the programme is being wound down, citing trust in the answer. Search Engine Land and Campaign relay it. Perplexity itself publishes nothing.

Perplexity described the units in its launch post as “sponsored follow-up questions” and “paid media positioned to the side of an answer”, and committed that “advertising material will be clearly noted as ‘sponsored’” and that answers to sponsored questions “will still be generated by our technology, and not written or edited by the brands sponsoring the questions”.

The example Perplexity published shows the Related list under an answer with six rows. The first row reads “How can I use Indeed to enhance my job search?” with SPONSORED in small grey letter-spaced capitals beneath it. It is set in the same type as the five organic follow-ups under it, with the same affordance on the right. A reader scanning the rail would have to be looking for the label to find it.

• Indeed, named by Perplexity, and the brand in its own example screenshot.
• Whole Foods Market, named by Perplexity.
• Universal McCann, agency, IPG Mediabrands. Named by Perplexity.
• PMG, independent agency. Named by Perplexity.
• TurboTax, not in the launch four; reported later by Adweek, running a sponsored question about investment income.

Those two numbers, given on the record to Digiday in September 2025, explain the outcome better than anything written since. A programme admitting under 0.5% of the advertisers who want in is not supply-constrained by accident; it is being rationed to protect something. Perplexity’s stated reason, in the reporting of the wind-down, was trust in the answer.

There is a structural reading too, and Perplexity gave it themselves at launch: they said they built ads the way they did specifically to “avoid duplicating the SEO industry where people are implementing arbitrary tactics to improve their rankings.” An ad unit designed to be indistinguishable from the organic rail, answering in the platform’s own voice, with the brand unable to write the answer, is a hard thing to sell at scale to advertisers who want control and measurement.

That $50-plus CPM is worth holding at arm’s length. It is an anonymous source describing a pitch deck, it was never on a Perplexity page, and it described a product that had not launched yet. Perplexity’s deck offered “exclusive category ownership through end of year” to charter partners with no price attached.

• The Merchant Program, free, no commission, a product feed and one-click checkout. Perplexity was explicit that this is not advertising: the cards “aren’t sponsored”, and the programme is “distinct from and unrelated to” the ad products. Perplexity’s announcement.
• Earn citations, the unpaid route, and the one Perplexity designed its ad product around not replacing.
• Perplexity Enterprise, sold to agencies as a research tool. Useful, and not a media buy.
• ChatGPT ads, the answer-engine ad product you can actually run today.

The shapes are worth comparing rather than conflating. Perplexity’s unit was a question: a row in the follow-up rail that, when tapped, produced a Perplexity-written answer the advertiser could not edit. ChatGPT’s units are closer to conventional ad products: sponsored cards and product carousels inside or beneath a reply, with the brand’s own copy and imagery.