Can Perplexity’s new model turn lawsuits into partnerships?
Perplexity’s fresh revenue approach offers payouts to publishers not just for page views—but for how its AI bots interact with their content.
Of all the AI players that intersect with media, Perplexity might be the most interesting. Longtime readers know I’ve been following the company closely, and their latest move, where it puts a meter on its own bots to pay publishers, feels simultaneously like a forward-looking business model and an oblique way to avoid licensing. I take a closer look at Comet Plus in this week’s column.
But first, a personal confession: I haven’t been this nervous about September since high school. Not only am I excited to be going to ONA, the annual conference of the Online News Association, in New Orleans later this week, but I’m going to be co-hosting a panel on AI, GEO, and the future of journalism with my friend Ricky Sutton of Future Media fame. If you’re going to be at the show, I hope you can check it out, but even if not, I’d love to meet up.
But that’s not the only thing keeping me on my toes: This week marks the beginning of the fall cohorts of my AI courses for PR professionals and journalists. I’ve spent big chunks of the summer rebuilding these classes with more workshopping, applying latest AI models, and, yes, agents. We’re all full now, but if you’re interested in a last-minute hookup, I know a guy.
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From clicks to crawls: Perplexity’s bet on AI revenue-sharing
In business, pulling off a pivot is no small feat. It's tricky to execute and rarely done lightly. You only change course when you're convinced that staying the course is a worse bet.
That’s likely the thinking behind Perplexity’s revamp of its revenue-sharing model for publishers. Quick refresher: Perplexity just unveiled a new subscription tier called Comet Plus. For $5 a month, users can access material from Perplexity’s publishing partners—those who opt in—with most of that money (80%) going to those partners. CEO Aravind Srinivas says the company has already committed $42.5 million to fund the initiative.
Although named after Perplexity’s Comet web browser, Comet Plus doesn’t require you to use Comet. You can access the content in any browser. However, with Comet, you also get access to the Comet Assistant—more on why that’s important in a minute. If you’re already a Pro or Max subscriber, Plus is bundled in.
The twist here is that Perplexity already has a publisher revenue program: the Perplexity Publishers’ Program, or PPP. Introduced last summer, PPP is ad-supported—when a publisher’s content appears in an AI-generated answer, any ad revenue generated from that answer (usually via a sponsored question) gets split with the publisher. PPP isn’t going away—Gannett just signed on—but Comet Plus sure looks like an implicit acknowledgment that PPP alone hasn’t cracked the code on making AI-powered search lucrative for media partners.
It also hasn’t prevented blowback. News Corp sued Perplexity last year, accusing it of copyright violations, while simultaneously praising OpenAI for going the direct-licensing route over revenue-sharing experiments. Perplexity tried to get the suit thrown out and failed. Around the same time, Japanese publishers Nikkei and The Asahi Shimbun Co. also filed suit.
A piece of the agent
Comet Plus marks a notable shift—a new monetization path and a reset on the copyright conversation. While rival AI search tools are drifting toward direct licensing or "pay-per-crawl" schemes that charge bots when they fetch content, Perplexity is still resisting models that involve paying upfront for data access.
Instead, they’re banking on monetization from the buyer side—advertisers or subscribers—and sharing that revenue. In the case of Comet Plus, Perplexity says 80% of the money goes to publishers, with the rest covering compute costs. Crucially, payouts are determined by three engagement categories: human engagement, search indexing, and agent activity (i.e., bots).
