They need Google to crawl their site to get traffic and views. They can’t push around Google or extract rent from them. Perplexity is a smaller company that needs content like the NYT more than the NYT needs them. And they are easier to shake down. Plus AI tools tend to not bring traffic to their underlying sources. If you get your answer up front, why visit the site and deal with their ads?
So I view it as partially a way for them to make money and partially a way for them to reasonably defend their content. But I don’t know what the NYT or others will do when Google copies other AI products like Perplexity. They won’t be able to say ‘no’.
So I view it as partially a way for them to make money and partially a way for them to reasonably defend their content. But I don’t know what the NYT or others will do when Google copies other AI products like Perplexity. They won’t be able to say ‘no’.