AI search company Perplexity has entered into a multi-year licensing agreement with Getty Images, allowing it to feature Getty’s images throughout its AI-driven search and discovery platforms. This partnership represents a significant change for Perplexity, which has previously faced criticism over alleged content scraping and plagiarism, and reflects a move toward building more official content collaborations.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Perplexity and Getty have already been collaborating for over a year, as reported to TechCrunch. Although not publicly disclosed, Getty participated in Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, which was designed to share advertising revenue with publishers when their material appeared in search results, the source noted.
The current arrangement is a fresh agreement. A source informed TechCrunch that it does not follow the typical lump sum licensing model, as Perplexity does not develop its own foundational AI models, but declined to provide further details about the terms.
This new partnership with Getty seems to validate some of Perplexity’s earlier use of Getty’s stock images. Over the past year, Perplexity has faced multiple plagiarism allegations from various media outlets. In one instance, the company was criticized for extracting material from a Wall Street Journal story, including a Getty image featured in the article.
At that time, several media organizations questioned whether Perplexity’s use of these images might infringe on copyright. Last year, a source told TechCrunch that Perplexity was negotiating an agreement with Getty, but repeated attempts to confirm this with the stock photo company were unsuccessful.
More recently, in October, Reddit filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing the company of “industrial-scale, unlawful” scraping of user data and bypassing technical safeguards to access information. Reddit itself has a data licensing deal with OpenAI.
Perplexity claims that its agreement with Getty will enhance how images are displayed and ensure that credits and links to the original sources are included whenever images appear in search results.
Nick Unsworth, Getty’s vice president of strategic development, stated that the deal “recognizes the significance of properly attributed consent and its role in improving AI-driven products.”
Jessica Chan, Perplexity’s head of content and publisher partnerships, commented, “Attribution and accuracy are essential for people to understand the world in the era of AI. By working together, we’re enabling users to find answers through compelling visual storytelling, while making sure they always know the origin and creator of the content.”
Perplexity’s focus on attribution is part of its broader approach to counter copyright claims, maintaining that its use of publisher content—including material behind paywalls or content that publishers have explicitly marked as off-limits for scraping—qualifies as “fair use” since publicly available facts are not subject to copyright.
