AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images. This agreement gives Perplexity permission to display images from Getty across its AI-powered search and discovery tools. The deal marks a notable shift for the company, which has faced allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Perplexity and Getty have been working together for over a year, according to a source familiar with the deal. Though it was never formally announced, Getty was previously part of Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, a plan to share ad revenue with publishers when their content surfaced in a search query. Today’s agreement is a new deal. A source said it is not a traditional lump sum licensing deal, since Perplexity does not train its own foundational models, but would not elaborate on the specific terms.
Perplexity’s agreement with Getty appears to legitimize some of the startup’s previous use of Getty’s stock photos. Perplexity came under fire last year for a series of plagiarism accusations from several news organizations. In one case, the startup was called out for pulling content from a Wall Street Journal article, including a Getty photo used in that piece. At the time, several outlets questioned whether Perplexity’s use of the images constituted copyright infringement. A source last year told TechCrunch that Perplexity was working on an agreement with Getty, but the deal could not be confirmed at that time.
More recently, Reddit sued Perplexity in October, alleging “industrial-scale, unlawful” scraping of user content and circumventing technical measures to access data. Reddit has a separate data licensing agreement with OpenAI.
Perplexity says its Getty deal will help it better display images and include credits with links back to the original source whenever images appear in search results. Nick Unsworth, vice president of strategic development at Getty, said the agreement acknowledges the importance of properly attributed consent and its value in enhancing AI-powered products.
Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, stated that attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI. She added that together, they are helping people discover answers through powerful visual storytelling while ensuring they always know where that content comes from and who created it.
Perplexity’s emphasis on attribution is part of its strategy of defending against copyright accusations. The company argues its use of publisher content, including content behind a paywall or that publishers have explicitly indicated they do not want scraped, constitutes fair use because publicly available facts are not copyrightable.