Perplexity has been under fire for scraping sites for content. And now some details have been leaked on how Perplexity will monetize traffic and search queries. Financial Times is reporting that Perplexity will allow brands to bid for “sponsored” questions that allow the brand to provide the AI-generated answer.

If the questions are sponsored and the answers are written by the brand, I struggle to understand where AI comes in. Regardless, there will be an audience and there will likely be a buyer as Nike and Marriott are rumored to be in talks with Perplexity.

Whilst Perplexity is growing quickly ($5mm in revenue in January to $35mm in August based on reports), the “search engine” is still only running 250 million queries per month. That compares to Google at 100 billion per month.