AI search startup Perplexity has signed a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, which gives it 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 been hit by allegations of content scraping and plagiarism, and signals an effort to establish more formal content partnerships.
Perplexity and Getty have been working together for more than a year, a source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. Though it was never announced, Getty was part of Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program, a plan to share ad revenue with publishers when their content surfaced in a search query, the source said.
Today’s agreement is a new deal. A source told TechCrunch it’s not a traditional lump sum licensing deal, since Perplexity doesn’t train its own foundational models, but would not elaborate on the 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 the Getty photo 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 we were unable to confirm the deal after reaching out to stock image giant several times.
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 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 show up 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.”
“Attribution and accuracy are fundamental to how people should understand the world in an age of AI,” Jessica Chan, head of content and publisher partnerships at Perplexity, said in a statement. “Together, we’re 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 by arguing its use of publisher content – including content behind a paywall or that publishers have explicitly indicated they don’t want scraped – constitutes “fair use” because publicly available facts are not copyrightable.
