AI-powered search and information service Perplexity has announced its new Perplexity Publishers’ Program. Under this program, the company will share advertising revenue with media companies whose content is used in the platform’s responses. The initiative comes after the company faced significant criticism from major news sites for using content without proper attribution, especially in the context of AI-generated responses that reference copyrighted content.

In the first phase, major media outlets including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur and The Texas Tribune have joined the Perplexity Publishers Program. Under this program, Perplexity will share revenue generated from advertising with these news outlets when a publisher’s content is used in response to user queries. “When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher’s content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share,” the official blog post states.

Reportedly, this revenue-sharing model is based on a double-digit percentage of ad revenue, as Perplexity’s chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told CNBC. Although the exact figure is still unknown, it is reportedly the same for all participating publishers.

According to a statement provided to The Verge by Perplexity spokesperson Sarah Platnick, these payments will be on a per-source basis. This means that the company will compensate partners for each article used in AI responses to user queries. Additionally, Perplexity is also building a long-term advertising model, and for now, it will temporarily offer publishers a cash advance on revenue.

In addition to revenue sharing, the Perplexity Publishers Program also offers several other benefits to its partners. These include free access to Perplexity’s online LLM API, which will allow publishers to create custom answer engines on their websites that will use only their content to answer user queries.

Additionally, Perplexity will offer its partners a one-year subscription to its Enterprise Pro tier, which includes advanced data privacy and security features. This subscription aims to support publishers’ staff by providing them with a valuable research and fact-checking tool. Perplexity will also collaborate with ScalePost.ai, an AI startup that helps establish partnerships between AI companies and publishers, to provide analytics on how often a publisher’s content is cited.

The launch of the Perplexity Publishers Program comes at a time when there is growing controversy over the AI ​​platform taking data from news websites without giving proper credit for the content used by the AI ​​system. The company has been accused of plagiarism from major publications including Forbes and Wired.

According to Dmitry Shevlenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, the company had been developing the program since January, long before the recent allegations surfaced. He told The Verge that the initiative was partly inspired by X’s ad revenue-sharing model and was aimed at establishing a sustainable framework for compensating publishers. According to Shevlenko, the main goal of the program is to support quality journalism, as well as provide a scalable business model for Perplexity’s future growth.