Publisher lawsuits against LLMs that offer answers rather than links are mounting. Perplexity thinks Comet Plus is the answer.
There is no list of publishing partners just yet, among other critical details. But on Monday, answer engine Perplexity announced Comet Plus, a plan to share revenue with news publishers – one day before news broke that two more big Japanese news publishers were suing Perplexity on copyright grounds.
The new complaint by Nikkei Inc and The Asahi Shimbun Company follows close on the heels of another by The Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings, both in timing and financial terms. Each wants about $15 million in damages and an injunction to stop what they say was Perplexity's theft of content, in some cases bypassing robots.txt prohibitions and other attempts to block its crawler agents.
In the USA, News Corp, Dow Jones, and the New York Post have filed similar claims against Perplexity, and many more are thought to be brewing in other jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Anthropic on Tuesday told a US court it had reached a draft settlement deal with book authors who sued it for what they said was its use of pirated books as training data.
AI overviews
Perplexity has long offered summaries of reports and issues that seemingly seek to make it unnecessary to visit the cited source sites. Google's AI Overviews more recently started offering the same functionality in many countries.
On Monday, Perplexity described what it says are three categories of traffic on the post-AI web.
"When you read the news on a website with your morning coffee, that's human traffic. When you ask Perplexity to synthesize recent coverage of an industry trend, that's indexed traffic. When Comet Assistant scans your calendar and suggests articles relevant to your day’s meetings, that's agent traffic."
Its Comet Plus subscription – details pending – will share revenue with partners for all three types of traffic, Perplexity said, on an 80/20 basis, with $1 of the initial $5 subscription staying with Perplexity.
"The revenue allocation recognizes the reality that users now choose how they want to consume information: browsing manually, asking for AI-generated answers, or deploying agents for complex tasks," said Perplexity.
Comet Plus will be built into the Pro ($20) and Max ($200) subscriptions Perplexity offers, as well as via standalone billing within its free tier.
A new model
The model is very different from the typically flat-fee licensing that OpenAI and Microsoft, among others, pay publishers for training data. Those deals avoid copyright claims, but public details show no incentive among publishers to better serve an AI agent audience in the way the Perplexity system does.
It also appears to be different from the single-publisher deal struck between the New York Times and Amazon earlier this year, allowing NYT content to be distributed via Alexa.
Google – a dominant source for traffic and so revenue to news sites – has reportedly talked to publishers about AI licensing deals of a pay-per-use nature, but has not announced any such agreements. And some publishers are worried about becoming invisible suppliers of information to AI brands, which could complicate negotiations.
In July, Cloudflare announced a private beta pay-per-crawl marketplace that will allow any publisher to charge LLMs to scrape via a "402 Payment Required" response and Web Bot Auth.
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