Financial Times 2026-04-09-1
Perplexity revenue jumps 50% in pivot from search to AI agents
Perplexity's real pivot is not from search to agents: it is from model consumer to model router. The $305M-to-$450M ARR jump conflates a pricing model change with genuine growth — the FT flags this explicitly — but 100M MAU gives them the distribution to make model providers compete for their traffic. The defensibility question is whether routing intelligence becomes a moat before the model providers bundle their own orchestration and squeeze the middleware out.