Perplexity is abandoning its advertising experiment just over a year after launch, according to a report.
The Financial Times reports that the AI search start-up is now winding down its advertising programme by the end of 2026.
Perplexity was one of the first AI search companies to test ads, placing sponsored answers beneath chatbot responses.
It said at the time that ads were clearly labeled and didn’t influence outputs. Executives now say perception matters as much as policy, with one quoted in the report saying that ads risk making users “suspicious of everything”.
Perplexity launched its ad experiment in November 2024 with ambitions to build a sustainable revenue-sharing model with publisher partners.
The company had positioned advertising as essential to its business model at launch, arguing that subscriptions alone could not generate enough revenue to support its growing publisher programme.
However, fewer than 0.5% of brands who applied to advertise on the platform were ever admitted, and Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, departed the company before the experiment had run its full course.
See an example of an ad below:
Source: Performance Marketing World
