How Perplexity AI plans to disrupt Google's monopoly

The company's CEO is confident that it will emerge as a true challenger to the search giant

- Leslie D'Monte

A California-based startup, Perplexity AI, is on a mission to disrupt Google's search engine monopoly.

In this modern-day A David versus Goliath saga, the underdog, armed with a lean team of 45 and $10 million in annual revenue, is challenging the status quo. The titleholder, boasting a colossal workforce of over 180,000 and annual revenues exceeding $300 billion, finds itself navigating the weight of stakeholder expectations amid this intense competition.

Yet, Perplexity AI's co-founder and CEO, Aravind Srinivas, is confident that his company's products and services will emerge as a true contender, challenging the search giant's dominance.

"It will happen in a way that's very different from what people have been expecting so far - that somebody is going to come and take market share from Google. And that instead of their 95% market share, they're going to drop to 80%, which means advertising revenue is going to move to somebody else," Srinivas said in a video interview from his California office.

While Google will still retain a 90-94% market share, it will "lose a lot of the high-value traffic from people living in high-GDP countries, earning a lot of money, and are willing to pay for a service that helps them with the task". He believes this will effectively impact Google's ad-related search revenue.