Perplexity is shifting away from ads and betting on subscriptions and enterprise sales—arguing that advertising can undermine trust in AI answers. For businesses, the move highlights a wider trend: “AI search” only delivers value when knowledge is governed, accessible, and integrated into workflows. The winners will pair great tools with strong adoption and KM foundations.

AI search is moving into its next phase: monetisation that doesn’t break trust.

According to reporting, Perplexity is shifting its business strategy away from advertising and towards subscriptions and enterprise sales, putting a bigger emphasis on revenue quality than on raw query volume. This is a meaningful signal for European organisations building AI into everyday work: the market is converging on a simple truth—AI is only valuable when people trust it.

Why Perplexity is choosing subscriptions over ads

Perplexity experimented with advertising in 2024, but has since moved away from it. Reporting suggests the company stepped back amid concerns about user trust and related internal changes.

Instead, the company is doubling down on paid value—especially for professionals who will pay for speed, precision, and reliability (examples cited include finance experts, doctors, and CEOs). Wider coverage frames the move as a conscious trade-off: trust and product integrity over ad-driven scale.

What this means for enterprise teams in Europe

For most organisations, “AI search” isn’t a product decision—it’s an operating model decision.

Perplexity’s shift highlights three enterprise realities:

1) Trust becomes the commercial differentiator

If users suspect incentives (ads, sponsorships, affiliate bias), they stop relying on the system for important work. Perplexity’s leadership is explicitly positioning trust as a reason to avoid ads.

2) Enterprise value is about workflow, not wow-factor

Reporting suggests Perplexity is building out an enterprise sales motion, placing it more directly in the “workplace search” conversation alongside tools like Glean.

In practice, enterprise search wins when it integrates into how work already happens: proposals, onboarding, incident response, customer support, policy queries, and product knowledge.

3) Your knowledge foundation decides your AI outcomes

Even the best AI search experience will disappoint if your internal knowledge is fragmented, outdated, or ownerless. That’s the real blocker behind many “AI isn’t working for us” conversations—teams don’t have a reliable source of truth.

The practical takeaway: subscriptions push AI search to prove ROI

Ads reward attention. Subscriptions reward outcomes.

A subscription-first model forces AI tools to deliver tangible business value: fewer tickets, faster onboarding, less time searching, better decision-making, and safer knowledge reuse. That’s also why the strongest enterprise deployments typically start with:

• clearly defined “golden sources” for key knowledge

• ownership and review cadences

• templates and standards for repeatable content

• integrations into daily tools (not another standalone portal)

Where Generation Digital fits

This is exactly the shift we help organisations prepare for: AI that changes how work gets done, not just how people search.

We support teams to:

• align stakeholders on the right use cases and success metrics

• strengthen knowledge foundations (so AI can retrieve trustworthy answers)

• implement the right tooling and integrations

• embed adoption and governance so the new way of working sticks

Summary

Perplexity’s pivot away from ads and towards subscriptions is a bet on the “trust economy” of AI search. For enterprise leaders, it’s a timely reminder: AI search becomes transformative when it’s grounded in well-managed knowledge and rolled out with a clear adoption plan—not when it’s treated as a bolt-on feature.

FAQs

Why is Perplexity moving away from advertising?
Perplexity has argued that ads can undermine trust in AI answers, because users may question whether responses are objective.

What is Perplexity focusing on instead?
Reporting describes a shift towards subscriptions and enterprise sales, targeting professionals and expanding enterprise go-to-market efforts.

What should enterprises learn from this?
That AI search must be trusted, governed, and embedded into workflows. Subscription-first incentives push vendors (and buyers) towards measurable outcomes rather than attention metrics.

Does this put Perplexity in competition with enterprise search tools?
Yes—coverage frames the move as closer to enterprise search competitors (e.g., Glean).