Inside Perplexity’s Strategy to Enhance Ads with Comprehensive Online Tracking
Perplexity CEO says the aim of tracking is to “sell hyper personalized” ads.
It seems Perplexity doesn’t just want to compete with Google. It wants to be Google. CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app, so it can sell premium ads.
Copying Google’s Personalized Approach
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs are purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
And work-related queries won’t help the AI company build an accurate-enough dossier.
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” he explained.
Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them.
“We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there,” he said.
The browser, named Comet, suffered setbacks but is on track to be launched in May, Srinivas said.
He’s not wrong, of course. Quietly following users around the internet helped Google become the roughly $2 trillion market cap company it is today.
That’s why it built a browser and a mobile operating system. Indeed, Perplexity is attempting something in the mobile world, too. It signed a partnership with Motorola, announced Thursday, where its app will be pre-installed on the Razr series and can be accessed through the Moto AI by typing “Ask Perplexity.”
Becoming Key Players
Perplexity is also in talks with Samsung, Bloomberg reported. While Srinivas didn’t confirm that, he did reference on the podcast the Bloomberg article, published earlier this month, that discussed both partnerships.
Obviously, Google isn’t the only one watching users online to sell ads. Meta’s ad tracking technology, Pixels, which is embedded on websites across the internet, is how Meta gathers data, even on people that don’t have Facebook or Instagram accounts. Even Apple, which has marketed itself as a privacy protector, can’t resist tracking users’ locations to sell advertising in some of its apps by default.
On the other hand, this kind of thing has led people across the political spectrum in the U.S. and in Europe to distrust big tech.
