Perplexity advertising head departs nine months after appointment

Taz Patel, head of promoting and procuring at AI search startup Perplexity, departed the corporate on August 29, 2025, after 9 months within the function. Based on Adweek, Patel joined Perplexity in December 2024 and was accountable for creating the startup’s rising promoting enterprise.

Patel’s exit comes as Perplexity continues increasing its promoting capabilities and exploring new monetization fashions. The corporate introduced its first promoting check in November 2024, introducing sponsored follow-up questions alongside AI-generated solutions. Based on firm statements, these sponsored questions are labeled clearly however the solutions stay generated by Perplexity’s expertise reasonably than advertisers.

Ryan Foutty, Perplexity’s vp of enterprise, advised Adweek: “It has been nice to have Taz on our crew, and we want him all the most effective in his future endeavors. Perplexity is pushed by velocity and curiosity, so our work continues unchanged and we nonetheless accomplice with the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and retailers who need to experiment and develop the most effective shopper experiences for the AI age.”

Promoting platform growth continues

Based on Search Engine Land reporting from November 13, 2024, Perplexity processes 100 million search queries per week. The platform’s promoting implementation follows months of growth, with the corporate initially focusing on a This fall 2024 launch for its advert platform.

Based on CNBC, Perplexity circulated a pitch deck to advertisers selling the app’s attain and person demographics. The platform processes greater than 230 million queries month-to-month and has been downloaded greater than 2 million occasions. Based on the presentation, 80% of Perplexity customers maintain undergraduate levels, 30% are in senior management positions, and 65% work in high-income white-collar professions.

Certainly, Entire Meals Market, Common McCann, and PMG emerged as the primary promoting companions testing Perplexity’s new advert choices. Based on firm statements, the promoting program helps generate income to share with writer companions, addressing limitations in subscription-only income fashions.

Income sharing and writer partnerships

Perplexity launched its revenue-sharing program in July 2024, giving publishers alternatives to earn cash by the search engine. Based on firm documentation, when customers ask questions and Perplexity generates advert income from citing articles in its solutions, the platform shares a share with the writer.

Media retailers together with Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel, and WordPress joined the preliminary Publishers Program. Based on Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief enterprise officer, publishers obtain a number of income shares if a number of articles from one writer are utilized in a single reply.

The promoting mannequin follows a CPM (price per thousand impressions) construction. Based on sources accustomed to the matter, CPM costs exceed $50, considerably larger than typical show promoting charges. Search advertising agency Semrush reported that desktop show advertisements usually have CPMs round $2.50, whereas cellular movies common about $11.10.

Firm progress trajectory

Perplexity’s promoting growth happens alongside speedy firm progress. Based on Bloomberg Information, the corporate’s annual recurring income elevated from $3-4 million in the beginning of 2024 to roughly $70 million by year-end. Day by day queries grew from 2.5 million to twenty million throughout the identical interval.

The corporate, valued at $9 billion as of December 2024, has attracted funding from distinguished expertise figures together with Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, and Bessemer Enterprise Companions. Notable traders additionally embrace Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, and Andrej Karpathy.

Based in August 2022, Perplexity emerged as a conversational search engine powered by giant language fashions. The platform synthesizes data from throughout the online and gives solutions with inline citations, distinguishing itself from conventional search engines like google and yahoo that primarily return lists of hyperlinks.

Technical implementation and person expertise

Based on firm statements, Perplexity’s promoting seems as sponsored follow-up questions on the aspect of solutions. The questions are labeled as “sponsored,” however the solutions to sponsored questions are generated by Perplexity’s AI expertise, not by manufacturers sponsoring the questions.

The platform initially centered on 15 key promoting classes together with expertise, well being and prescribed drugs, arts and leisure, finance, and meals and beverage. Based on the corporate’s pitch deck, advertisers can sponsor “associated questions” beneath solutions and buy show advertisements adjoining to Perplexity-generated responses.

Perplexity emphasizes that promoting income doesn’t affect its AI-generated solutions. Based on firm documentation, the platform maintains unbiased service supply and protects person privateness, with private data not shared with advertisers.

Business context and aggressive positioning

Perplexity’s promoting growth comes as AI-assisted search beneficial properties traction amongst customers looking for alternate options to conventional search engines like google and yahoo. OpenAI launched SearchGPT in July 2024, whereas Google launched “AI Overviews” in Might 2024, permitting customers to see fast reply summaries on the prime of search outcomes.

The AI search market faces challenges round content material utilization and attribution. Based on courtroom paperwork from October 2024, The New York Instances despatched Perplexity a cease-and-desist discover claiming copyright infringement by unauthorized use of its content material. Dow Jones and the New York Publish filed comparable lawsuits, elevating questions on content material attribution and utilization rights.

Based on investigations by Wired journal and internet developer Robb Knight in June 2024, questions arose about Perplexity’s compliance with robots.txt requirements controlling internet crawler entry. CEO Aravind Srinivas said that Perplexity depends on each proprietary and third-party internet crawlers, explaining the complexity of content material entry mechanisms.

Future promoting fashions

Srinivas has outlined a radical imaginative and prescient for future promoting fashions the place AI brokers, reasonably than people, develop into the first goal for commercials. Based on an interview carried out on December 30, 2024, Srinivas defined: “The person by no means sees an advert. The totally different retailers usually are not competing for customers’ consideration; they’re competing for the brokers’ consideration.”

This proposed system would contain AI brokers appearing as intermediaries between manufacturers and customers. When customers make requests, a number of firms would compete for the AI agent’s consideration within the backend, with out human customers seeing conventional commercials.

Based on Srinivas, AI brokers might “spend much more compute energy” analyzing affords and making selections primarily based on person preferences. Customers might instruct their brokers to disregard sure manufacturers, with these preferences remaining confidential between customers and their brokers.

Patel’s background and expertise

Earlier than becoming a member of Perplexity, Patel served as co-founder and chief income officer at influencer-marketing agency Captiv8, which Publicis Groupe acquired in Might 2025. He beforehand held gross sales management roles at Interclick and BlueLithium, each acquired by Yahoo.

Based on his skilled background, Patel performed key roles in profitable exits all through his profession and credit his gross sales management expertise as formative to his method to promoting expertise. He graduated from the College of California, Berkeley.

Throughout his tenure at Perplexity, Patel was accountable for bringing entrepreneurs, retailers, and technologists collectively to construct promoting integrations and procuring experiences in AI-driven platforms. The corporate expanded its choices in October 2024 by introducing Areas, an AI-powered collaboration hub permitting customers to create personalized information areas.

Platform enlargement past search

Perplexity has expanded past pure search performance to incorporate procuring capabilities and premium subscription tiers. In November 2024, the corporate launched an AI-powered procuring hub backed by Amazon and Nvidia, offering product suggestions in response to person queries.

The platform launched finance-related options together with real-time inventory quotes and firm earnings knowledge, sourcing monetary data from Monetary Modeling Prep. Based on firm supplies, these expansions purpose to create complete AI-powered data and commerce experiences.

Perplexity launched its Perplexity Max subscription tier on July 2, 2025, offering limitless entry to superior AI fashions together with OpenAI’s o3-pro and Claude Opus 4 for $200 month-to-month. The premium tier targets professionals, content material creators, enterprise strategists, and educational researchers requiring superior AI capabilities.

Business implications

The advertising neighborhood has watched Perplexity’s monetization developments intently since promoting represents a essential income stream for AI search platforms. Perplexity’s method differs from conventional SEO practices by emphasizing clear promoting alternatives that encourage person engagement by pure curiosity.

Conventional promoting fashions face potential disruption as AI brokers develop into extra refined and able to making buying selections on behalf of customers. Based on trade evaluation, this transformation might prioritize model consciousness campaigns over direct response promoting codecs that at the moment dominate digital advertising spending.

The departure of Patel comes as Perplexity continues constructing its promoting infrastructure throughout what firm management described as a historically robust interval for digital promoting spending. The corporate indicated that this experimental promoting section will assist form future promoting codecs primarily based on person suggestions and efficiency metrics.

As synthetic intelligence platforms more and more compete with established search engines like google and yahoo, promoting integration turns into important for sustainable enterprise fashions. Perplexity’s method to sustaining unbiased search outcomes whereas producing promoting income will doubtless affect how different AI firms develop their monetization methods.

Timeline

Abstract

Who: Taz Patel, former head of promoting and procuring at Perplexity AI, and the bogus intelligence search firm valued at $9 billion

What: Patel’s departure from Perplexity after 9 months of creating the corporate’s promoting enterprise and revenue-sharing packages with publishers

When: August 29, 2025, 9 months after becoming a member of the corporate in December 2024

The place: Perplexity AI, the San Francisco-based synthetic intelligence search startup competing with Google Search

Why: Whereas particular causes for the departure weren’t disclosed, the exit happens as Perplexity continues increasing its promoting platform, exploring new monetization fashions, and constructing partnerships with main manufacturers and companies to develop AI-powered promoting experiences

PPC Land explains

Perplexity AI: Based in August 2022, Perplexity operates as a conversational search engine powered by giant language fashions that synthesizes data from throughout the online and gives solutions with inline citations. The San Francisco-based firm has achieved a $9 billion valuation and processes over 230 million month-to-month queries, distinguishing itself from conventional search engines like google and yahoo by providing direct solutions reasonably than lists of hyperlinks.

Promoting income: Perplexity’s major monetization technique past subscriptions, carried out by sponsored follow-up questions and show commercials positioned adjoining to AI-generated responses. The platform operates on a CPM mannequin with charges exceeding $50, considerably larger than typical show promoting, and shares income with writer companions when their content material is referenced in solutions.

AI search: A brand new class of search expertise that makes use of synthetic intelligence to grasp queries and generate complete solutions reasonably than returning lists of internet sites. This method represents a basic shift from conventional keyword-based search, enabling customers to obtain direct solutions with citations whereas sustaining conversational interplay patterns all through their information-seeking course of.

Income sharing: Perplexity’s writer partnership program launched in July 2024 that compensates content material creators when their articles are cited in AI-generated responses. Publishers obtain financial compensation when customers ask questions and Perplexity generates promoting income from citing their content material, with a number of income shares obtainable when a number of articles from one writer seem in a single reply.

CPM (Price Per Thousand Impressions): The pricing mannequin utilized by Perplexity for its promoting platform, the place advertisers pay for each thousand occasions their sponsored content material seems to customers. Based on sources accustomed to the platform’s pricing construction, Perplexity’s CPM charges exceed $50, considerably larger than trade averages for show promoting which generally vary from $2.50 to $11.10 relying on format and placement.

Sponsored questions: The first promoting format carried out by Perplexity, showing as clearly labeled follow-up questions positioned alongside AI-generated solutions. These questions are created by advertisers however the responses stay generated by Perplexity’s AI expertise reasonably than being written or edited by the sponsoring manufacturers, sustaining the platform’s dedication to unbiased data supply.

Writer partnerships: Strategic relationships between Perplexity and content material creators together with main media retailers like Fortune, Time, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress, designed to pretty compensate publishers for content material utilization whereas constructing a sustainable revenue-sharing ecosystem. These partnerships tackle considerations about content material attribution and supply publishers with new monetization alternatives within the AI-powered data panorama.

Consumer demographics: Perplexity’s viewers profile characterised by excessive training ranges {and professional} standing, with 80% holding undergraduate levels, 30% in senior management positions, and 65% working in high-income white-collar professions together with drugs, legislation, and software program engineering. This demographic composition makes the platform engaging to advertisers focusing on prosperous, educated customers with important buying energy.

Giant language fashions: The substitute intelligence expertise powering Perplexity’s search capabilities, enabling the platform to grasp pure language queries, analyze internet content material, and generate complete responses with correct attribution. These fashions enable Perplexity to take care of conversational interactions whereas processing complicated data requests and synthesizing knowledge from a number of sources into coherent solutions.

Content material attribution: The system by which Perplexity gives citations and references for data utilized in its AI-generated responses, addressing copyright considerations and making certain correct credit score to authentic content material creators. This method consists of inline citations, writer income sharing, and transparency measures designed to take care of moral content material utilization whereas constructing sustainable relationships with media retailers and content material platforms.