Perplexity, which is gaining attention as a rival to Google, will fully introduce an advertising system to its AI-based search platform by the end of this year. Perplexity is changing the flow of the conversational AI search engine market based on large language models (LLMs) by attracting huge investments from Nvidia, Amazon, SKT, etc.

Perplexity, a startup that provides conversational AI search services, announced that it will introduce advertising on its platform and share revenue from content from Time and Fortune magazines, Reuters reports.

Perplexity is expected to influence the existing web search engine market such as Google and Microsoft by not only integrating AI into web search services but also applying advertising.

This is because Perplexity's generative AI has secured the performance to handle over 230 million search requests per month worldwide. Perplexity won first place overall in the chatbot usability evaluation (The Great AI Chatbot Challenge) announced by the Wall Street Journal in May of this year.

In particular, Perplexity's generative AI search engine has a short delay from searching to finding an answer, and provides users with information about the source, increasing accuracy. You can search as if you were communicating with a person, and it provides various search results such as quotes, images, and graphs related to the answer.

Perplexity has reportedly raised $62.7 million in funding from new investors including Nvidia and Amazon.

Last June, SKT also invested 10 million dollars (approximately 13.7 billion won) in Perplexity and solidified cooperation in the generative AI search engine business. To this end, Perplexity is expected to visit Korea this year to discuss AI cooperation plans.

Through the collaboration between the two companies, SKT will enhance its generative AI-based search engine to be installed in global AI personal assistant services, including ‘A. (Adot)’. It will also pursue joint marketing through various channels, including Adot, T Universe, and T Membership.

Additionally, Perplexity will invest in Global AI Platform Corporation (GAP Co.), which SKT established in Silicon Valley last year, and jointly develop an AI search service.

SKT said, “Through this investment, we will be the only domestic telecommunications company to provide the Perplexity service to domestic customers,” and added, “We plan to provide the paid subscription search service ‘Perplexity Pro’ to our customers free of charge for one year.”