Perplexity ads reporting from February 2026: what brands can measure

On February 18, 2026, the Financial Times reported that Perplexity had moved away from its consumer advertising experiment. This article records that dated report. It does not present abandoned ads as a current, platform-wide Perplexity policy.

As of July 24, 2026, Perplexity's official site still has an advertising page for enterprise teams. That page describes Perplexity as a research and answer product for advertising work. It does not establish that sponsored placements appear below consumer answers, and it does not resolve the status of the earlier experiment.

What the dated reporting can show

The February report is evidence about what was reported on February 18, not a guarantee about every account or surface on July 24. Product policies, experiments, and availability can change. Recheck the platform before using this article as current news.

• A paid placement is an advertising product and should be labeled as such.
• A citation is a linked source in an answer. It is not evidence of a paid placement.
• A human referral is an observed visit from an AI product. It is not proof of a citation or recommendation.
• A crawler request is infrastructure evidence. It is not proof of indexing, citation, recommendation, or conversion.

What Perplexity documents about access

Perplexity's crawler documentation describes PerplexityBot as a crawler intended to surface and link websites in Perplexity search. It describes Perplexity-User as a fetcher for user actions that may visit a page while answering a question. The two controls are independent, and the documentation says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for foundation-model training.

Allowing a crawler can make a request possible. It cannot guarantee that a page will be selected, linked, recommended, or visited by a person.

What brands should measure

For answer evidence, save the exact query, platform, date, location, response, and links. For human behavior, use analytics to separate AI referrals, sessions, goals, and revenue from other sources. For infrastructure, inspect PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User requests by path, timestamp, and HTTP outcome when the source records them.

SearchSeal keeps these views separate: privacy-friendly website analytics for observed human activity, plus a crawler evidence module for requests and outcomes. A change in one view does not explain or cause a change in another without separate evidence.

Dated conclusion

The safe conclusion on July 24, 2026 is narrow. February reporting described a decision about a consumer advertising experiment, while Perplexity's current official pages describe an enterprise advertising use case and separate crawler identities. Those sources do not guarantee organic recommendation, citation, referral, or conversion. Treat this URL as a dated reporting analysis and verify the platform before acting.