In the fall, the AI-powered search engine Perplexity began rolling out a shopping assistant and checkout experience that it hopes will shrink the time for users between discovering a new product on its service and buying it.
Now the company is working with a Seattle-based tech startup called Firmly.ai to help make it easier for just about any online brand, big or small, to start selling goods directly through Perplexity’s shopping results.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko said more than 150 e-commerce merchants have expressed interest in selling goods through the AI search platform since the company began rolling out its shopping tools in November.
But in order to expand the Perplexity shopping experience to thousands of online retailers and brands or more, it needed a technology partner that could help the company easily connect with all of them through a single integration that provides users with a good checkout experience while online retailers still control the customer data and the transaction itself.
“It lets us focus on building the best user experience and not have to get as deep into the weeds on the merchant checkout,” Shevelenko said.
For many years, some of the largest consumer internet companies—from Google to Instagram to Pinterest to Twitter—experimented with trying to turn their users’ attention into direct merchandise sales, with little to no success. Some, including Google and Pinterest, ultimately gave up on their attempts. But more recently, interest in the idea of enabling internet users to buy products wherever they discover them—even if it’s not on an e-commerce site like Amazon or a retailer’s own website—has reignited with the help of a certain blockbuster video-sharing app that is also selling billions in merchandise annually on behalf of retailers and e-commerce brands, big and small.
“People want instant gratification,” said Kumar Senthil, CEO of Firmly.ai, whose back-end technology helps power these buy-anywhere experiences. “TikTok has brought that kind of mindset; they just want to buy it and don’t care to go through 15 clicks to do it.”
Perplexity’s Shevelenko declined to offer specifics on the popularity of the company’s new shopping features other than saying that shopping-related queries have increased by fivefold since the November launch. He added that the AI search startup is still working through the best ways to surface product recommendations without turning its users off.
“Sometimes people are doing research where they aren’t looking to make a purchase,” he told Fortune, “and if you’re hitting them over the head with, ‘Buy this, buy this,’ you might rub some users the wrong way.”
Perplexity isn’t taking a cut of sales made through its search results, so retailers that sell through the Firmly integration will receive all the proceeds of each purchase. And Shevelenko implied that it plans to stick with this approach long-term.
“It’s important that users trust our intentions,” Shevelenko said. “Something that is a broader problem with a lot of consumer internet services is that people have just lost trust in results algorithms.”
While Shevelenko didn’t directly call out Perplexity’s main legacy competitor, Google, his boss certainly has.
“Native transactions are the best way to go after the AdWords revenue,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X this week, referencing Perplexity’s choice to integrate purchases directly into its search engine versus Google’s practice of auctioning off sponsored search results to retailers that want to attract shoppers. But, he cautioned, ”it will take a while to get right and make it seamless.”
And the would-be Google rival is betting that Firmly will help it get there.
