LLM Search Marketing

People are getting more of their news and content from LLM search engines than ever before. And this behavior is growing.

But how can LLM search engines and publishers find collective success in a service designed to be consumed entirely on the search platform?

One potential model is the recently announced Perplexity Publishers Program (PPP).

In the coming months, Perplexity plans to introduce advertising through its "Related" questions feature.

Brands will pay to ask specific related follow-up questions in Perplexity's answer engine interface. When Perplexity earns revenue from an interaction where a publisher’s content is referenced, that publisher will also earn a share.

Perplexity has brought in a measurement partner (Scalepost.ai) to provide analytics about how related posts and citations are being engaged with, and presumably to provide a basis for share accounting.

Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas says that the product is designed to align incentives between AI technology and quality journalism. And to create a place for brands within the experience.

It feels kind-of early for this kind of thing, since LLM search engines are still emergent and it's not clear whether the commercial model will be user-pays, or ad-supported, or a combination, or something else.

But it does differentiate Perplexity by putting them in the ad-supported space. And provides a real world test for the market and marketers.

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-the-perplexity-publishers-program