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 positioning AI search as an alternative to conventional, ad-led search. Follow-on coverage said Perplexity had been pursuing revenue-sharing discussions with publishers, making the handling of source material central to whether those partnerships could progress.
The dispute escalated from attribution concerns to a direct Forbes demand to remove Forbes-sourced material; separate reporting also raised questions about crawler behavior. Together, those developments turn Pages from a product feature into a test of publisher control over AI-mediated distribution.
First-order effects
Forbes and other affected outlets risk having exclusive reporting presented in Perplexity's interface with diminished source visibility, while Perplexity faces immediate credibility and publisher-relations pressure around Pages.
The allegations make attribution, sourcing, and reuse practices an operational issue for Perplexity rather than merely a product-design choice.
Second-order effects
Publishers have greater incentive to seek explicit licensing, revenue-sharing, removal, or crawler-control terms before allowing AI-search products to surface their work.
Rival AI-search products may need to make citations and source traffic more conspicuous to distinguish their publisher posture and limit similar disputes.
Third-order effects
If AI answers increasingly substitute for visits to original reporting, publishers' bargaining focus is likely to shift from referral traffic alone toward enforceable terms governing reuse, attribution, and compensation.
The episode points to a broader contest over whether web publishers can meaningfully control content used as AI-search input; the durability of robots.txt and voluntary attribution as safeguards remains uncertain.
The trend: AI search is forcing a renegotiation of the exchange between publishers that produce reporting and interfaces that summarize and distribute it.
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…
Btw @AravSrinivas and @perplexity_ai, the two investigative stories you copied were behind our paywall. Is scraping and republishing premium stories another “rough edge” you're working on? That @markgurman Apple scoop was also paywalled.
This is the fundamental challenge of news based business models. There are no IP laws protecting facts so your expensive reporting can always be coopted by a less scrupulous player. https://www.forbes.com/...
Artificial intelligence or plagiarism as a service? Given you can't copyright facts, these AI aggregators can do simple rewrites that say “Forbes reported that <X>” which is what Business Insider has done for years to avoid plagiarism. This is likely how they'll “fix” this bug. […
@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…
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/...
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
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?
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.
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
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…
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/...
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…
@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/...
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/...
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/...
@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 ....
“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.”
@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.…