AI search startup Perplexity has inked a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images that legitimizes its use of stock photos and marks a strategic pivot toward formal content partnerships. The agreement comes after months of plagiarism accusations from major news outlets and signals the company's effort to move beyond scraping controversies that have dogged its rapid growth.
Perplexity just made its biggest move yet to clean up its copyright mess. The AI search startup's multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images doesn't just give it permission to display stock photos - it retroactively legitimizes months of questionable image usage that sparked industry-wide backlash.
The timing couldn't be more critical. Perplexity has been fighting a two-front war against plagiarism accusations and legal challenges, with Reddit's October lawsuit alleging "industrial-scale, unlawful" scraping still pending. This Getty Images partnership represents the company's first major content licensing victory.
According to sources familiar with the deal who spoke to TechCrunch, Getty Images has quietly been part of Perplexity's Publishers' Program for over a year, sharing ad revenue when their content surfaces in search queries. Today's announcement formalizes a much broader relationship.
The deal structure breaks from traditional licensing models. Since Perplexity doesn't train its own foundational models like OpenAI or Google, it's not paying the typical lump-sum fees that AI companies negotiate for training data. Instead, sources suggest it's a performance-based arrangement tied to actual image usage and attribution.
"Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI," Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. The emphasis on attribution isn't just PR speak - it's central to Perplexity's legal defense strategy.
The startup has been arguing that its use of publisher content constitutes "fair use" because publicly available facts aren't copyrightable. But that defense got harder to maintain when outlets started documenting specific cases where Perplexity lifted entire photos alongside scraped Wall Street Journal articles.
