AI search startup Perplexity AI has announced that it will start testing ads on their platform from this week. Clients who have signed up till now include Indeed, PMG, Universal McCann and Whole Foods Market. 

In a blog post making the announcement, the Perplexity AI stated, “To fully deliver on our mission to spark the world’s curiosity, we need to invest in building not just a beloved product, but a robust and self-sustaining business.”

The startup also promised that the ads will not make the user experience cluttered. They will also be marked as “sponsored” even if they’re a part of the follow-up questions or as “paid media” on an answer. 

Perplexity AI said that if the user clicks on the sponsored question, the answer will not be written by the brand, instead the platform’s AI will generate an actual answer. Additionally, personal information of users will also not be shared with advertisers. 

“While brands are keen on understanding how their companies appear in AI answer engines like ours, we will avoid duplicating the SEO industry, where people are implementing arbitrary tactics to improve their rankings at the expense of user utility,” Perplexity AI noted. 

The goal they said was to create genuine curiosity about a brand among users instead of manipulating answers to include brands.

During the U.S. Presidential election, the startup debuted an AI-powered election information hub.