Perplexity Publishers’ Program: Every Revenue-Share Partner and How It Works

Explore with AI

Open in ChatGPTOpen in ClaudeOpen in PerplexityOpen in Google AI Mode

Last updated: July 20, 2026

When Perplexity announced its Publishers’ Program in mid-2024, it was trying to answer a question that hangs over every AI answer engine: if the model reads your article and summarizes it, and the reader never clicks through, what do you get in return? Perplexity’s answer was money. The program promised to pay publishers a share of advertising revenue whenever their content is cited as a source in an answer that carries an ad.

This post is the verified map of that program: who joined, how the revenue share actually works, how it evolved into the subscription-based Comet Plus in 2025, and the parallel story of the publishers who chose lawsuits over partnership. For the wider licensing picture, see our roundups of OpenAI’s publisher deals and the full AI content licensing landscape.

What the Perplexity Publishers’ Program is

Perplexity introduced the Publishers’ Program on July 30, 2024. Unlike the flat-fee content licensing deals that OpenAI and Google were signing, Perplexity’s model was framed as a revenue share tied to advertising. The pitch: rather than pay a lump sum up front, Perplexity would pay publishers on an ongoing basis every time their reporting helped answer a user’s question inside an ad-supported response.

The program launched alongside Perplexity’s first advertising experiment, built around “related” or sponsored follow-up questions. The company also bundled in extras for partners: a free year of Perplexity’s Enterprise Pro tier for all of a publisher’s employees, free access to Perplexity’s developer APIs so a publisher could build its own answer engine, and analytics through a partnership with ScalePost.ai to help publishers see how their content was being used.

The launch came after months of public criticism. In June 2024, Forbes and Wired had accused Perplexity of copying their work, and the program was widely read as an attempt to convert an adversarial relationship with the press into a commercial one. If you want the underlying mechanics of how Perplexity retrieves and cites sources, see how Perplexity works.

Every verified publisher partner

Perplexity started with six launch partners and added a larger international group in December 2024. The table below lists the partners Perplexity has publicly named for the original ad-based Publishers’ Program. (The later Comet Plus subscription program, covered further down, has its own partner list, though several names overlap.)

The December 2024 expansion brought Perplexity’s first partners from the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain and Latin America, reflecting how much of its user base is international. Perplexity announced the additions alongside the hire of Jessica Chan, formerly of LinkedIn, as its head of publisher partnerships. Counting RTL Germany’s two brands (stern and ntv) separately, Perplexity described the group as 15 new media partners.

How the revenue share works

The core idea is straightforward, but the details matter. Perplexity does not pay publishers just for being crawled. It pays when a publisher’s page is cited as a source in an answer that also carries an ad. The advertising itself comes from sponsored follow-up questions that Perplexity places alongside answers.

Here is the mechanic, as described by Perplexity and reported by Digiday:

• Citation triggers payment. When Perplexity earns ad revenue from a response, and a publisher’s webpage was cited as a source for that response, the publisher earns a share of that revenue.
• Each publisher gets a set percentage. The exact figure varies by publisher but sits in what Perplexity’s head of publisher partnerships called a “double digit percentage.” Perplexity says a typical answer cites four to eight sources on average.
• Multiple citations multiply the payout. If two of a publisher’s pages are cited in the same answer, that publisher earns roughly twice the base share for that answer, according to a Perplexity spokesperson.
• There is a reported cap. The Wall Street Journal reported, and two publishing executives confirmed to Digiday, that the total revenue share paid out per answer is capped at around 25%. When many cited publishers would collectively exceed that ceiling, individual payouts scale down.

The practical takeaway is that this model rewards being cited often and prominently rather than driving raw referral traffic. That is a real shift from the classic SEO bargain, where the payoff was a click. Early on, several publishing executives were candid that the sums were modest: one told Digiday the traffic and revenue from Perplexity were not yet “a huge revenue driver.” Around 20 publishers were participating in the program’s first year.

A separate program: Comet Plus subscriptions

By 2025 the program had grown a second, subscription-based leg. In late August 2025, Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a $5-per-month add-on (free to existing Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers) tied to its Comet browser. It launched to users in early October 2025.

Comet Plus changed the split dramatically. Perplexity said it would pay 80% of Comet Plus revenue to participating publishers and keep 20% to cover computing costs, funded from an initial revenue pool of $42.5 million that would grow as subscriptions grew. Where the original program paid only on ad-supported citations, Comet Plus pays across three kinds of activity:

• Human visits: people browsing directly to a publisher’s site through the Comet browser.
• Search citations: a publisher’s content cited as a source in a Comet answer.
• Agent actions: a publisher’s content used by Comet’s AI assistant to complete a task.

The named Comet Plus launch partners were Condé Nast (across The New Yorker, Wired, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and Vogue), Fortune, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, and Le Figaro. Fortune and the Los Angeles Times appear in both the original program and Comet Plus. Notably, Condé Nast, which had sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist in 2024, appears among the Comet Plus partners, a sign of how quickly some adversaries became commercial counterparts.

The publishers who sued instead

Not everyone took the deal. The Publishers’ Program has run in parallel with a growing set of disputes and lawsuits, and it is worth understanding both sides. Our AI copyright lawsuits tracker covers these cases in more depth; here is the short version as it relates to Perplexity.

• Forbes (June 2024): Forbes accused Perplexity of closely reproducing its scoop about a former Google CEO’s drone startup through the Perplexity Pages feature, with minimal attribution. Forbes sent a letter alleging “willful infringement” of its copyright. Perplexity’s CEO said the company would cite sources more prominently going forward.
• Condé Nast (July 2024): The publisher of Wired, The New Yorker and Vogue sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing Perplexity of plagiarism. A Wired investigation reported that Perplexity’s crawler had accessed content in ways that ignored robots.txt directives. Condé Nast later joined Comet Plus in 2025.
• News Corp, Dow Jones and the New York Post (October 2024): This was the major publisher case when the program launched. On October 21, 2024, Dow Jones (publisher of The Wall Street Journal) and the New York Post sued Perplexity in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their work. The complaint centered on Perplexity’s use of retrieval-augmented generation to reproduce content, sometimes verbatim, without proper credit. The publishers asked the court to stop Perplexity from using their articles and to order the destruction of any database built from them. They said they had offered a licensing discussion in July, and had not heard back.
• BBC (June 2025): The BBC threatened legal action, demanding that Perplexity stop using its content, delete existing copies, and offer financial compensation. Perplexity called the claims “manipulative and opportunistic.” It was the BBC’s first formal move against an AI company.

The pattern is telling. Some publishers negotiated a share of the upside; others decided the terms, or the underlying behavior, were unacceptable and reached for their lawyers. Both camps are betting on the same thing: that being a source for AI answers is now valuable enough to fight over.

What this means for your AI visibility

Whether a publisher signs a revenue-share deal or sues, the underlying reality is the same: the thing that now carries value is being cited as a source inside AI answers. Perplexity’s whole program is built on top of its citation graph. If your brand is never in the cited sources, you are neither earning a share nor even part of the conversation.

That is exactly what our platform measures. LLM Pulse tracks how often Perplexity (and ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews) cites and mentions your brand, which of your URLs get surfaced as sources, and how your share of voice compares to competitors across the prompts your customers actually ask. Instead of guessing whether Perplexity is pulling from your site, you can see the citations and mentions week over week, watch sentiment, and find the queries where a rival is being cited and you are not. For the tactical side of earning those citations, see how to rank in Perplexity and our guide to tracking which sources AI cites.

The bottom line

Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program was one of the first serious attempts to pay the open web for feeding AI answers. It began in July 2024 with six partners and an ad-revenue share, grew to more than 20 international outlets by December 2024, and matured in 2025 into Comet Plus, an 80/20 subscription split funded from a reported $42.5 million pool. It has not silenced the critics: News Corp’s lawsuit is live, and the BBC, Forbes and (initially) Condé Nast pushed back hard. But the direction of travel is clear. Citations now carry real value on the AI web, and whether you monetize them or litigate over them, the first step is knowing whether you are being cited at all.