4 days Ago By Kamya Pandey
Explainer Briefly Slides Artificial intelligence (AI) search engine Perplexity has launched a series of new shopping features. One of these features, called ‘Snap to Shop’, allows users to take a picture of an item, and search for the item using Perplexity, similar to how they would search for items using Google Lens. This is a part of Perplexity’s paid subscription plan Perplexity Pro .
Users can get product listings for the items they search for using ‘Snap to Shop’, and buy the product without leaving the search engine. Besides Snap to Shop, Perplexity Pro can also give people product listings based on specific prompts, so for instance, if you are looking for furnishings for a home office, the search engine will find your individual product listings of the items you need. Further, it picks up reviews from all over the internet and summarises them for the users to help them easily pick between different product listings.
Monetising AI-enabled search In August this year , Perplexity signed a revenue-sharing agreement with news publishers such as TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and The Texas Tribune and WordPress.com after allegations that it plagiarised news content. Soon after, the company saw lawsuits from the News Corp (made up of publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post) and also the New York Times for copyright violations and AI scrapping, respectively.
As more and more companies continue to challenge Perplexity on grounds of plagiarism, the company needs finances to fund both its legal battles and potential revenue share agreements, making it necessary for it to wind ways to monetise its content. Perplexity’s shopping feature launches also come as tech companies are racing to look for ways to monetise their AI offerings. Recently, Google monetised its AI overviews by placing ads relevant to the user query and the response within the Overview section.
So far, the company has rolled out these advertisements for its mobile users in the US. The company has also expanded on Google Lens functionality through its “advanced AI models” to give users information about any product they look up, including reviews and price comparisons. Also read:.
