Using AI for Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

Perplexity AI, Inc., or simply Perplexity, is an American privately held software company offering a web search engine that processes user queries and synthesizes responses.[4] Perplexity products use large language models and incorporate real-time web search capabilities, providing responses based on current Internet content, including inline source citations.[5] A free public version is available, while a paid Pro subscription offers access to more advanced language models and additional features.[6]

Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded in 2022[7] by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. As of July 2025, the company was valued at US$18 billion.[8]

Perplexity AI has attracted legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times.[9][10] According to separate analyses by Wired and later Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of news websites who disallow or explicitly block web scraping.[11][12]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization Overview

Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded in 2022[7] by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. As of July 2025, the company was valued at US$18 billion.[8]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: History

In August 2022, Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.[13] It launched its main search engine on December 7, 2022, and has since released a Google Chrome extension and an app for iOS and Android.[6][5][14] In February 2023, Perplexity reported two million unique visitors.[5] By April 2024, Perplexity had raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion.[15] As of June 2025, Perplexity closed a $500 million round of funding that elevated its valuation to $14 billion.[16] Investors in Perplexity AI have included Jeff Bezos, Tobias Lütke, Nat Friedman, Nvidia, and Databricks.[17][18][15] During Bloomberg’s Tech Summit 2025, Srinivas shared that the company processed 780 million queries in May 2025, experiencing more than 20% month-over-month growth, processing around 30 million queries daily.[19]

In July 2024, Perplexity announced the launch of a new publishers’ program to share ad revenue with partners.[20]

On January 18, 2025, the day before the impending U.S. ban on Chinese social media app TikTok, Perplexity submitted a proposal for a merger with TikTok US.[21][22][23][24]

On August 12, 2025, Perplexity made a bid to buy Google Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion.[25] Perplexity stated that the sale could remedy anti-trust litigation against Google, in which a judge was considering compelling the sale of Chrome.[26]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Products and services

Perplexity products perform web search, summarize the search results, and produce text with inline citations[17]. They also enable users to generate customizable web pages and research presentations based on user prompts.[27] Perplexity services bundle access to multiple products. Perplexity adopted a freemium model for individual users, while a paid enterprise service is also available.[15]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Subscription service (Pro)

Perplexity Pro, the premium subscription tier of Perplexity AI, provides access to an API[17] and also enables users to search both internal files and web content. It allows the user to select between backend models such as GPT-5, GPT-4.1, o4-mini, Claude 4.0, Grok 4 and Gemini Pro 2.5.[28] The company has also developed its own models Sonar (based on Llama 3.3)[29] and R1 1776 (based on DeepSeek R1).[30]

As of 2025, the Pro version is available for free for one year to Samsung Galaxy phone and tablet owners in the United States[31]

and to Airtel users.[32][33]

Also, Perplexity is providing a free one-year promotion to all university students when they install Comet. [1]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Internal Knowledge Search

Internal Knowledge Search enables Pro and Enterprise Pro users to simultaneously search across web content and internal documents. Users can upload and search through Excel, Word, PDF, and other common file formats. Enterprise Pro users have a limit of 500 files for upload and indexing.[34]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Search API

Perplexity’s Search API provides AI developers with programmatic access to the company’s search infrastructure. The release in September 2025 includes a software development kit (SDK), an open-source evaluation framework called search_evals, and documentation detailing the API’s design and optimization.[35]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Shopping hub

Perplexity’s Shopping Hub launched in November 2024 with backing by Amazon and Nvidia.[36]

It is an online shopping platform that includes AI-generated product recommendations and enables users to purchase products directly through Perplexity’s interface.[36][37]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Finance

In October 2024, Perplexity AI introduced new finance-related features, including looking up stock prices and company earnings data. The tool provides real-time stock quotes and price tracking, industry peer comparisons and basic financial analysis tools. The platform sources its financial data from Financial Modeling Prep (FMP).[38][39]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Assistant

In January 2025, Perplexity launched the Perplexity Assistant, an AI-powered tool designed to enhance the functionality of its search engine. It can perform tasks across multiple apps, such as hailing a ride or searching for a song, and is capable of maintaining context across actions.[14] The assistant is also multi-modal, meaning it can use a phone’s camera to provide answers about the user’s surroundings or on-screen content.[14] Perplexity has acknowledged that the assistant is still in development and may not always function as expected. For instance, certain features, such as summarizing unread emails or upcoming calendar events, require users to enable a workaround based on notifications.[14]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Comet

In July 2025, Perplexity launched Comet, an AI browser based on Chromium. Initially, access to the browser is limited to users subscribed to the highest, most expensive subscription tier, with broader availability expected over time.[40] A key feature of the browser is the integration of the Perplexity search engine,[41] which enables users to perform a variety of tasks such as generating article summaries, describing an image, conducting research about a topic and composing emails.[42] As of 2025, Perplexity is providing all students with access to the Comet browser and 12 months of free Pro subscription.[2]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Leadership

Aravind Srinivas is the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI.[43][44][45]

Srinivas was born on June 7, 1994 in Chennai.[46][47] He earned dual degrees (B.Tech and M.Tech) in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.[46] He later pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.[48] During his academic career, Srinivas held research positions at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence.[49][50]

In December 2024, Srinivas stated that he had been waiting for a US green card for nearly three years.[51] His tweet asking whether he should get a green card was responded to by Elon Musk with a ‘yes’, which sparked debate on US immigration.[52] In the same year, Time magazine named him one of the “TIME100 Most Influential People in AI”.[53]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Copyright and trademark infringement allegations

In June 2024, Forbes publicly criticized Perplexity for using their content. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some “rough edges” and accepted feedback but maintained that Perplexity only “aggregates” rather than plagiarizes information.[54][55] In October 2024, The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity to stop accessing and using NYT content, claiming that Perplexity is violating its copyright by scraping data from its website.[56] In June 2024, Dow Jones and New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit also alleges that Perplexity attributed quotes to an article on F-16 jets for Ukraine that never appeared in the original article.[57] Perplexity released a blog post to address the lawsuits on October 24, 2024. It stated that the complaints are misleading and reiterated that it was open to revenue-sharing programs.[58] On January 31, 2025, Perplexity was sued in the United States for alleged trademark infringement by Perplexity Solved Solutions (PSS), a software firm founded in 2017.[59] The lawsuit claims that Perplexity AI’s use of the name “Perplexity” violates PSS’s federally registered trademark and could cause consumer confusion. PSS had previously declined an offer from Perplexity AI to purchase the trademark in 2023. The suit seeks to prevent Perplexity AI from using the name in its branding and marketing.[60] In June 2025, the BBC threatened legal action against Perplexity AI, demanding that the company stop the unauthorized scraping of its content, delete all retained BBC material used in training its models, and provide financial compensation for the infringement of its intellectual property rights.[61] On August 8, 2025, Japanese newspaper company Yomiuri Shimbun filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for “free-riding” of 120,000 articles of the publication from February to June 2025.[62] Later that month, two more Japanese newspaper companies, The Asahi Shimbun and The Nikkei, also filed lawsuit against the company for alleged copyright infringement.[63]

Using AI for Search Engine Optimization: Stealth web crawlers

In June 2024, separate investigations by the magazine Wired and web developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity does not respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol (or robots.txt) standard, which may include requests for web crawlers to not scrape sections of the site’s content, despite Perplexity claiming the opposite. Perplexity also lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of their web crawlers publicly, but according to Wired and Robb Knight, they use undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt.[11][64] In response, Srinivas stated that Perplexity is not ignoring robots.txt, but suggested it relied on third-party web crawlers that do.[65] When asked, Srinivas declined to say that Perplexity would cease scraping Wired content using third parties.[65]

In August 2025, Cloudflare published research finding that Perplexity was using undeclared “stealth” web crawlers to bypass Web application firewalls and robots.txt files intended to block Perplexity crawlers.[66][12] Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that Perplexity acts “more like North Korean hackers” than like a reputable AI company.[67] Perplexity publicly denied the claims, calling it a “charlatan publicity stunt”.[68]

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Conclusion

This guide explored Using AI for Search Engine Optimization, combining factual insights from Wikipedia and competitor data. Use this information to make better decisions and stay ahead.