AI search engine Perplexity is republishing parts of stories by Forbes and others, with nearly identical words and inadequate attribution, on its Pages feature
The startup, hailed as an AI-focused Google challenger, is republishing parts of exclusive stories from multiple publications …
Forbes
Context & Ripple Effects
The report put Perplexity’s publisher relationship under scrutiny just as the company was pursuing an advertising business model, creating tension between AI-search distribution and the news outlets supplying the underlying reporting. Perplexity had previously said it planned to sell advertising in its search product.
The dispute quickly broadened from attribution to the terms on which AI services access and reuse journalism: Perplexity later cited work on publisher revenue-sharing arrangements, while Forbes subsequently sought removal of content it said infringed its IP.
First-order effects
Forbes and other affected publishers face their reporting appearing in Perplexity’s Pages with wording close to their originals but insufficient source credit, weakening their control over how that work is presented.
Perplexity faces an immediate trust and rights-management problem around Pages, including pressure to improve attribution or remove publisher-sourced material.
Second-order effects
Publishers have stronger incentive to seek explicit licensing, revenue-sharing, and enforceable usage terms rather than rely on citations as compensation for AI-search reuse.
The dispute raises the value of technical and contractual publisher controls; subsequent reporting alleged web access that disregarded robots.txt, making crawler behavior part of the commercial conflict.
Third-order effects
If AI-search products regularly answer queries with repackaged reporting, publisher leverage will increasingly turn on negotiated access and enforceable controls rather than referral traffic alone.
The unresolved boundary between indexing, summarization, and republication could push AI-search providers toward more formal publisher partnerships—or intensify rights disputes where those arrangements do not emerge.
The trend: AI search is shifting from linking users to publisher pages toward directly packaging publisher information, forcing a new contest over attribution, access, and revenue sharing.
The end of the open web has been a while coming (with big tech's platforms doing everything to lock their users in) but how Silicon Valley is using AI is going to be the killer blow. The only logical response is to make content harder to access and find to avoid being ripped off…
@JohnPaczkowski @perplexity_ai Thanks for flagging this. The screenshot you shared is of a new product feature we released two weeks ago called “Perplexity Pages”. It has rough edges, and we are improving it with more feedback. The core Perplexity product has, from day one, had a…
@AravSrinivas @perplexity_ai You scraped and repurposed investigative reporting gathered over months, fleshed it out with re-blogs of the same story by other outlets, and do not even bother to name us in your regurgitated post beyond a"Sources" link, which is click to expand. [im…
In April Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told me “The web is free to crawl for anybody.” Now through its latest feature, Perplexity Pages, it appears to be blatantly ripping off content from multiple news outlets including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. By me and @SarahNEmerson. [im…
“A Perplexity post with over 20,000 views about Elon Musk routing chips from Tesla to xAI was originally a CNBC exclusive, but CNBC was not named in the post and is one of four outlets signaled through a small circular stamp.”
Perplexity is scraping the work of journalists at Forbes, CNBC, Bloomberg and other pubs, claiming its tiny, missable footnotes are fair credit. In our case, it also lifted text and artwork. Will @AravSrinivas answer our questions? w/ @RashiShrivast18: https://www.forbes.com/...
Our reporting on Eric Schmidt's stealth drone project was posted this AM by @perplexity_ai . It rips off most of our reporting. It cites us, and a few that reblogged us, as sources in the most easily ignored way possible. Note the views. #zeroclick https://www.forbes.com/... [ima…
Friends, don't develop gen AI products like this. AI is already putting many people, especially journalists, out of jobs. Should we steal from them too?
Forbes @SarahNEmerson + @JohnPaczkowski and team deserve credit for breaking 2 stories in 1 move which gets my *Very Meta Reporting Award* 🥇1st intentionally on AI + Eric Schmidt's drones 🥈2nd unintentionally on AI + Perplexity's drones* *which copied Forbes 1st story... If
not just google AI citations going to kill publishers while enriching the companies often wonder how the people at these companies think news is gathered — if you kill off publishers giving you search results you are left with garbage in garbage out https://x.com/...
This is pretty nuts - it took me like 5 minutes searching around on this page to even find the reference to the original Forbes reporting that the AI-news-aggregator leached.
@CodeMonkey_frfr ... No, you don't get to release a product and be like “oopsie!” They know exactly what their products are doing, they just do not care. If they cared, they'd test. They don't get to say “we intend to improve” when called out and expect to be taken in good faith.…
@AravSrinivas @perplexity_ai The screenshot you shared that has prominent sourcing at the top is not what I'm talking about. This page, which reads like an original news article, does not have appropriate attribution. https://www.perplexity.ai/...
this, btw, is the context for the frustration and deep skepticism of partnering with AI companies to help their search products. there is an unnervingly straight line from this to an assumption that the job of all reporters is to gather string for an algorithm
Other AI-powered apps have been doing this too. I wrote about @arcinternet's Browse For Me feature which also scrapes from web pages. There's attribution, sure, but most people aren't going to click through to the original. https://www.engadget.com/...
They did it with our TikTok scoop from earlier this week, too. This is investigative reporting, sourced painstakingly from whistleblowing company insiders. AI can't do that kind of work, and if we want people who do, this can't be allowed to happen. https://www.perplexity.ai/...
@CodeMonkey_frfr ... You have to be kidding. Letting out tools that don't behave as intended out into the wild with flaccid assurances that there is every intention to fix the problems ....
I try not to be precious about too much, but @richardjnieva and I have broken ~every single~ piece of news about this project, which has involved months of reporting that Perplexity comes very close to plagiarizing (without even mentioning us by name!) https://x.com/...