Perplexity AI Inc., a well-funded startup with an artificial intelligence search engine, today launched a revenue sharing program for publishers.

The company’s search engine incorporates information from news articles into the prompt responses it generates. Under the new revenue sharing program, publishers will receive compensation when Perplexity makes money from prompt responses based on their articles. The program is rolling out a few weeks after Forbes accused the company of plagiarizing some of its content in search results.

San Francisco-based Perplexity is backed by more than $165 million in funding. It provides a search engine that doesn’t display a standard list of webpages in response to queries, but rather generates a natural language text snippet that directly answers the user’s question. It also lends itself to other tasks such as solving math problems.

Perplexity generates revenue with a paid version of the search engine that generates more detailed responses than the free edition. A few months from now, the company plans to add a second revenue stream in the form of an advertising service. The service will allow brands to display promotions below the answers that Perplexity’s search engine generates in response to user questions.

Under the revenue-sharing program announced today, publishers will receive a flat fee when their content is used in search results that generate ad revenue for Perplexity. CNBC reported that the company plans to pay a double-digit percentage of ad revenue for each news article cited by its search engine. When an AI query response references multiple articles from the same publisher, the publisher is separately compensated for each.

In addition to a cut of ad sales, participating newspapers will receive a free one-year subscription to the paid version of Perplexity’s search engine. The company will also provide access to its application programming interfaces along with technical support. Perplexity envisions publishers using the APIs to embed its search engine into their websites. 

“We structured this program to ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties,” said Perplexity Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas.

The program is rolling out a few weeks after Forbes accused Perplexity of plagiarizing one of its paywalled articles in a search result. Shortly thereafter, Wired reported that the search startup collects content from websites even if their robots.txt records indicate they wish to opt out of scraping. Moreover, the report found that one of the crawlers used by Perplexity is seemingly configured to avoid websites’ blocking attempts.

The company is seeking to sign up 30 publishers to its new revenue-sharing program by year’s end. The initial participants include Der Spiegel, Entrepreneur, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, TIME and Automattic Inc., the developer of WordPress. Automattic provides a hosting service called WordPress.com that powers a large number of websites, some of which contain content relevant for Perplexity’s search engine.

The revenue-sharing program is launching about four months after rumors emerged that Perplexity is seeking to raise more than $250 million at a valuation of up to $3 billion. Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that the company’s annualized recurring revenue stood at $20 million. The potential revenue boost from Perplexity’s upcoming search ads might help it increase the size of the round or secure a more favorable valuation.

Image: Perplexity