AI start-up Perplexity could be a viable challenge to Google’s current monopoly on search queries.

Perplexity is currently experiencing substantial revenue growth, with a monthly revenue rate of seven times the amount generated at the beginning of 2024. The company is on track to reach annual revenues of $35m this year, according to the Financial Times.

The company describes itself as ‘a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question’ in the same way that Google describes its mission being ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.

Both companies seek to provide answers to user queries and focus on reliable results to increase adoption of the tools they produce.

Following a recent US court ruling that Google is a monopolist and illegally paid for default search engine placement, companies may look to alternative search engines to replace Google.

Google’s may have to relinquish some its 90% market share of general search services if the antitrust ruling imposes sanctions on the tech titan.

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Companies such as Perplexity stand to gain a greater share of search traffic if users have more freedom to choose their preferred search engine.

Perplexity also has its sights set on improving the AI landscape more broadly with a recent announcement of a $250,000 gift to US university Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.

The gift is intended to support the university to conduct research on AI and journalism with work already underway on how AI and news coverage can work synonymously.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity said: “AI can be a powerful tool for researching, fact-checking, and improving the accessibility of key reporting, but we need to operate with a framework that prioritises quality and reliability.”

Perplexity also recently announced a revenue-sharing model with publishers, called the “Publishers Program.” It has already signed deals with Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, Der Spiegel, WordPress.com, and others.