Perplexity

On 2025-10-22 Perplexity announced native integration into Google Chrome: users can set it as their default engine and route omnibox queries to it, an implementation built on Chrome's OpenSearch protocol. That places the company on ground Google controls, and the note reads the timing against antitrust scrutiny of default-search arrangements by the US DOJ and European regulators. A working alternative inside Chrome supplies evidence that viable competitors exist.

Shopify's Q3 2025 report, on 2025-11-04, supplied the commerce measure: AI-generated traffic to merchant stores up 7x since January 2025, purchases made through AI-powered search up 11x. Shopify named Perplexity alongside OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot as the conversational platforms into which it wired its shopping capabilities.

Matthew Connelly, vice-dean for AI initiatives at Columbia University, files the company under a harder heading. In a New York Times op-ed he sets its campus sign-up drives (compétition d'inscriptions sur campus (2024)) beside OpenAI handing students free ChatGPT Plus during finals and Google granting a full year of premium access, tactics he reads as AI companies taking hold of higher education with administrators' unwitting help.

Alex Pawlowski, writing in The Strategy Stack, assigns it a narrower job: Perplexity for expansion during Discovery Mode, Claude for depth and continuity, ChatGPT for iteration speed. Graphite.io counts it among the answer engines that make citation, not clicks, the object of optimization.

The money question stays unsettled. Publishers lose visits, crediting cited sources is unresolved, and search advertising lives in the link lists that synthesized answers displace.