Perplexity drops ads and bets on subscriptions

Perplexity has stopped selling ads. Jessica Chan, its head of publisher partnerships, told an Advertising Week audience in New York in October 2025 that the company is “not taking any new advertisers,” and that ads are not on the roadmap for Comet, its AI browser. Source The decision matters because it splits the AI search market in two. Perplexity is walking away from the ad model at the same moment OpenAI is walking into it.

Part of the reason is that the ads never earned much. According to The Information, Perplexity generated roughly $20,000 in ad revenue against about $34 million in total revenue. Source That is a rounding error. Taz Patel, who ran advertising and shopping, left the company in August 2025 after nine months. Source The early ad tests had run with brands like Whole Foods, Indeed, and Universal McCann. Source

Why ads and AI answers fit badly together

The deeper problem is trust. People come to an answer engine expecting a straight answer, and a sponsored result inside that answer reads as a reason to doubt it. The numbers back the worry. In the reporting around Perplexity’s pause, only 9% of consumers said they were highly confident in AI-generated search results, and 37% said they were strongly disinterested in using AI for search at all. Source If you are trying to convert skeptics into paying users, putting ads in front of them works against you.

So Perplexity made the opposite choice from the open web. Instead of monetizing attention with ads, it is monetizing the answer itself through subscriptions, and routing a large share of that money to the publishers whose content makes the answers possible.

What replaces ads: Comet Plus and paying publishers

The vehicle is Comet Plus, a $5 per month subscription Perplexity announced in late August 2025 and bundles into its Pro and Max plans. Source Publishers receive 80% of Comet Plus revenue, with Perplexity keeping 20% to cover compute. Source The company seeded the program with a $42.5 million pool that grows as the subscriber base grows. Source

What makes Comet Plus different from a standard licensing deal is what it counts. Payouts track three kinds of traffic: human visits to a publisher’s site, citations when Perplexity uses an article to answer a query, and agent actions when Comet’s assistant reads a site on a user’s behalf. Source That third category is the new part. It tries to pay for the traffic that AI agents quietly take when they browse a page so the user never has to. Source

Chan framed the pitch around publisher survival, saying participating publishers could make “millions” and that “Perplexity only succeeds if journalism succeeds.” Source The exact split per partner is negotiated and not public, and Perplexity has declined to name which existing partners moved into Comet Plus. Source Its broader publisher roster has included Time, Fortune, Gannett, and The Independent. Source

The contrast with OpenAI is the real story

Two of the most visible AI search products picked opposite revenue models in the same year. OpenAI started showing ads inside ChatGPT in February 2026, for free and lower-tier users. Source Perplexity went the other way and bet the business on people paying. One model treats the answer as inventory to sell against. The other treats the answer as the product and asks you to buy it.

It is too early to call a winner. Perplexity’s bet only works if enough people pay, and ad revenue of $20,000 tells you how little it is leaving on the table by quitting. OpenAI’s bet only works if ads inside answers do not erode the trust that brought people there. Both companies are wagering on the same scarce thing, which is whether users believe the answer.

What it means for marketers

If you had Perplexity pencilled in as a paid placement channel, that door is closed for now, and Chan was explicit that it will not open inside Comet. Source The way to show up in Perplexity is the way you always could: be the source it cites. That puts the work back on content quality, structured information, and being the page an answer engine wants to quote. If you are a publisher, Comet Plus is a live revenue line worth understanding, including how its agent-traffic accounting compares to your existing licensing deals.

TL;DR

• Perplexity stopped taking new advertisers and ruled ads out of Comet, announced at Advertising Week in October 2025. Source
• Ads were tiny: about $20,000 of roughly $34 million in revenue, per The Information. Source
• The replacement is Comet Plus, a $5 per month subscription that pays publishers 80% of revenue from a $42.5 million pool. Source
• Payouts count human visits, citations, and agent actions, with the agent-traffic part being the novel piece. Source
• The move is the mirror image of OpenAI, which began running ads in ChatGPT in February 2026. Source

Related

• What is conversational advertising — the guide to the format Perplexity walked away from.
• What Perplexity plans for its ads platform — the earlier signals of the pause that became this decision.
• ChatGPT’s transaction fee vs ads — another way AI products are testing revenue beyond ads.