Every second of every day, people across the world type tens of thousands of queries into Google, adding up to trillions of searches a year. Google and a few other search engines are the portal through which several billion people navigate the internet. Many of the world's most powerful tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have recently spotted an opportunity to remake that gateway with generative AI, and they are racing to seize it. And as of this week, the generative-AI search wars are in full swing. The value of an AI-powered search bar is straightforward: Instead of having to open and read multiple links, wouldn't it be better to type your query into a chatbot and receive an immediate, comprehensive answer?

When people type a question into Perplexity, the two-year-old search engine scours the internet and uses information from multiple sources, including online publishers, to synthesize an answer using AI. Soon, Perplexity will start sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch around the end of September, the company announced on Tuesday. The initiative, known as the Perplexity Publishers' Program, comes less than two months after the San Francisco-based startup backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, and valued at 3 billion, came under fire from Forbes, Wired, and Condé Nast for allegedly scraping content without permission and ignoring robots.txt, Perplexity's initial partners include TIME, Fortune, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com. It's not clear exactly how much revenue Perplexity will share with publishers.

Silicon Valley appears, once again, to be getting the better of America's newspapers and magazines. Tech companies are injecting every corner of the web with AI language models, which may pose an existential threat to journalism as we currently know it. After all, why go to a media outlet if ChatGPT can deliver the information you think you need? A growing number of media companies--the publishers of The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, New York, Politico, The Atlantic, and many others--have signed licensing deals with OpenAI that will formally allow the start-up's AI models to incorporate recent partner articles into their responses. OpenAI is just the beginning, and such deals may soon be standard for major media companies: Perplexity, which runs a popular AI-powered search engine, has had conversations with various publishers (including The Atlantic's business division) about a potential ad-revenue-sharing arrangement, the start-up's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, told me yesterday.