Why Perplexity’s Advertising and Online Shopping Efforts Are Crawling at a Snail’s Pace
Perplexity's ad and e-commerce engines are stuck in first gear—while rivals speed toward revenue.
Growth Stalls Amid Fierce Competition
The AI search darling's monetization strategy hits major roadblocks. Advertising partnerships move slower than expected. Shopping integrations face technical hurdles and merchant hesitation. User adoption lags behind projections.
Infrastructure Limitations Bite
Scaling personalized ads requires deeper user profiling—something Perplexity's privacy-first approach resists. Real-time shopping inventory synchronization strains existing architecture. Integration costs balloon as custom solutions outpace off-the-shelf options.
Market Timing Misses the Mark
Entering crowded ad space against Google and Amazon demands either revolutionary tech or massive war chest—Perplexity shows neither yet. E-commerce plays require merchant adoption before user convenience, creating classic chicken-egg stagnation.
Meanwhile, VCs keep pouring billions into AI—proving yet again that nothing fuels funding like the ability to lose money at scale.
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Perplexity is being careful not to flood the platform with ads in order to keep the user experience clean. However, this slow rollout has raised doubts about whether Perplexity will even continue with advertising. Originally, the firm called the effort an experiment, and its ad head, Taz Patel, left the company last month. Still, how Perplexity handles both ads and shopping matters a lot to AI investors because these are two major ways to make money outside of paid subscriptions. Nevertheless, only about 0.5% of advertisers who asked to run ads were accepted, and the company is intentionally moving slowly.
Ads appear as “sponsored follow-up questions,” and even those advertisers allowed in often felt disappointed. Furthermore, Perplexity made just $20,000 in ad revenue in Q4 2024 and was working with only about a dozen advertisers earlier this year. Meanwhile, its e-commerce push is a bit stronger. It lets users buy select products directly through a service called Buy With Pro, using PayPal or Venmo, but only for certain items. If that option isn’t available, shoppers must go to an outside site. But brands still can’t directly upload product data, and the lack of a shopping cart has turned some retailers off.
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