Marty Swant of Digiday has seen the Perplexity pitch deck for building an advertising business:

According to a copy of the pitch deck obtained by Digiday, the plan is to integrate ads within users’ queries and answers

When the idea of using an LLM as a search engine started floating around, this is where I expected we would end up. Not because I am some kind of expert, but if you can be sure on anything online, it’s that it eventually ends up with adverts.

Sure Perplexity may be the first one to make this move, but as Google replaces everything with Gemini — expect the same result. Further poisoning of results based on who pays the most money.

There are a few examples given in the pitch deck that feel like simple banner ads alongside results, but the below really hits home.

Another option is to have “branded explanatory text” that appears above sponsored and organic related questions.

When search results were a list of links with sponsored content, and some SEO slop, at least you felt part of the conversation. As much as the company pointed you to its favorite links, you could click a few and ‘test’ the results you were shown.

The whole concept of a search engine starts to break down when the only result from an LLM-based search engine is explainer text, provided by the brand that pays the most money. Please, could this AI bubble burst already before we break the web entirely.