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Artificial intelligence-powered search engine Perplexity is in talks with brands including Nike and Marriott over its new advertising model, as the start-up mounts an ambitious effort to break Google’s stranglehold over the $300bn digital ads industry.

The San Francisco-based group is seeking to redesign the auction-based ads system pioneered by Google, where marketers bid to have a sponsored link placed against search queries.

At present, Perplexity’s AI chatbot gives a comprehensive response to user questions based on information from the internet, citing sources and including links to web pages. Below this, Perplexity offers suggested follow-up queries.

Under its new advertising model, brands will be able to bid for a “sponsored” question, which features an AI-generated answer approved by the advertiser.

Perplexity has held talks with a small number of top companies, including Nike and Marriott, according to correspondence seen by the Financial Times. The company said it hoped to roll out the ads system by the end of the year and was targeting “premium” brands. Nike and Marriott declined to comment.

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive and a former Google intern, said: “Ads are really useful when they are relevant and coming from brands that are high quality, and a lot of people make purchases based on that.”

Perplexity’s effort is part of a wave of new competition faced by Google as the search business undergoes its most radical shift in more than two decades.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT also provides quick and complete answers to many questions, threatening to render redundant a traditional search engine’s list of links, and the lucrative ads that appear alongside them.

Google, which has spent billions of dollars developing generative AI, has launched an experimental AI search function and also considered offering a subscription AI search service, the FT reported in April.

Analysts suggest Google is held back by the “innovator’s dilemma” as generative AI could damage the basis of its existing search offering. However, there remains scepticism on whether the technology will seriously disrupt Google’s dominance.

Under Perplexity’s ad system, marketers will be charged on a so-called CPM basis — paying above $50 for every 1,000 impressions generated by these sponsored posts, said a person familiar with the model. This compares with an estimated $1,100 for the same number of impressions by Google, according to analysts eMarketer.

Last year, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said its multibillion-dollar alliance with OpenAI would improve its Bing search engine, while helping to demolish the high profit margins that have underpinned Google’s core business.

But despite being one of the first big tech giants to add AI to search, Microsoft has only just started to gain more share in search advertising in the latest quarter, said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis.

Meanwhile, Google’s search business has grown 14 per cent in the three months to June, compared with the same period the year before. Search accounted for $48.5bn in revenue, more than half of parent company Alphabet’s total revenues.

“As the incumbent champion, Google has the most to lose from any shake-up,” Teasdale said. “But Google is also in the strongest position: it’s strong in AI, users trust it for search, and it controls key user surfaces like Android and Chrome that it can deploy its version of AI search on.”

The financial success of Perplexity’s new ads system depends on whether it can gain significant scale. The company says 250mn queries were made on its search engine in July, compared with 500mn in the whole of last year.

Perplexity makes money through subscriptions, charging $20 a month for its Pro service, which offers access to more advanced models and image generation. Annualised revenues — a projection of full-year revenues based on extrapolating the most recent month’s sales — have grown from $5mn in January to $35mn in August, according to the company.

Srinivas said he wanted its advertising system to become “a money-printing machine.”

“A good chunk of our traffic comes from the US and other high GDP countries, making it a good experiment . . . we want to IPO and be a successful company of our own, and there is no reason not to be.”

Additional reporting by Eri Sugiura and Kana Inagaki

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‘Poor judgement and lack of accountability’

PA Media

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‘Denied justice for two decades’

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Brad Raffensperger is all too familiar with attempts to subvert US democracy.

The Secretary of State for Georgia was on the receiving end of the infamous Donald Trump phone call after the 2020 election, when the then-president urged his fellow Republican to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Raffensperger refused and death threats ensued.

Almost four years on from the unrest that followed the last presidential election, Raffensperger is again in the crosshairs of the Trump faithful, as he battles a Maga-friendly majority on the swing state’s election board who passed last-minute laws that critics claim will pave the way for post-election legal chaos, if not violent unrest.

“There are a lot of bad actors out there,” Raffensperger acknowledged as he visited a polling station in DeKalb County this week for a “security health check”, a live test of one of the big-screen voting machines that will be used across Georgia on the November 5 election. “That’s why we need people that are going to stand their ground no matter what.”

If the loudest election deniers in the Republican party are to be believed, there will be plenty for Raffensperger to resist.

He and others in the state are in a battle to prevent ‘bad actors’ from undermining the vote in Georgia, both through public education about voting systems and by rolling out security measures, including panic buttons, for poll workers and training in using antidotes for poisoning.

Simultaneously, officials at the county level “are trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the election results in Georgia if former president Trump loses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).

Their goal is to use allegations of fraud as a “pretext” for election deniers who would then refuse to ratify the results from Georgia on January 6 2025, he added, in what “would literally be history repeating itself”.

Trump has foreshadowed such an outcome. “We have to make sure that we stop [Democrats] from cheating,” he said at an Atlanta rally in August. He then praised three of five members of the state election board as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory”.

The trio, who were appointed by Republicans, have pushed through a last-minute rule change that allows local election officials to halt the certification of election results in order to conduct a “reasonable inquiry”, without defining what reasonable might look like.

The board on Friday introduced a rule that all ballots in Georgia must be hand-counted — a move that campaigners warned was unlawful and unworkable, and could delay the election result for weeks. Raffensperger has accused the board of introducing “eleventh-hour chaos”, but he has no power to reverse their decisions.

A report published by Crew last month found that at least eight election officials in Georgia had refused to certify election results since 2020, the most of any swing state since the last cycle. They all remain in their positions.

With fewer than 50 days to go to the election, and Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck in the Georgia polls, Raffensperger has embarked on a tour of more than two dozen counties to reassure the 5mn voters expected in the state that their votes will be safe.

Alongside technicians working for his office, he painstakingly demonstrates how the Dominion Voting Systems devices used in Georgia — themselves the target of conspiracy theories — are protected from hackers and illegal tampering, and how votes are digitally counted and cross referenced.

“There is a process in place and it has worked well in the past,” the 69-year-old former engineer said, in his soothing Southern drawl. He insisted local election officials have no discretion to stop certification. “When you come to the following Monday, the state law says you must, counties shall certify the election . . . that’s right there in black letter law.”

The Harris campaign, among others, is challenging the state election board’s new rules in court, with a trial set to begin next month.

Pro-democracy activists have expressed faith in the legal system to prevent attempts to delay results. Efforts to undermine the vote “will ultimately fail because of the robust protections in place and because journalists, pro-democracy advocates, and voters are watching closely,” said Justin Berger, a Georgia lawyer working for advocacy group Informing Democracy.

Crew said any election official who refuses to certify election results can expect to be sued “immediately” by well-prepared attorneys.

But Berger warned of an ominous “change of tactics” in the run-up to the 2024 vote. “It’s not so much a full-frontal assault as it is guerrilla warfare, because [the election deniers] win if they just create uncertainty . . . all it took was some manufactured uncertainty [in 2020] and we had January 6,” he said of the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill.

Although Georgia has more election deniers in crucial positions than elsewhere, they are making inroads in other swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Marc Elias, a lawyer who successfully fought more than 60 lawsuits brought by election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 vote and now works for the Harris campaign, has warned Republicans are “building an election subversion war machine” and are “far more organised” than four years ago.

As well as installing election deniers in key election administration roles, groups who promoted conspiracy theories after the 2020 vote have attempted to disqualify tens of thousands of voters in key states, in so-called mass voter challenges, claiming the rolls are full of dead people, illegal aliens, or Americans who have moved to other states.

Even if such efforts have been largely unsuccessful, there are mounting fears of voter intimidation and the targeting of poll workers.

A recent poll found almost 30 per cent of Republicans with favourable views of Trump want armed citizens to take over as poll watchers.

In Georgia, where two poll workers were hounded out of their homes and jobs after being falsely accused of fraud by then Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the last election, Raffensperger’s office has handed out lanyards with panic buttons to individuals working in precincts across the state.

Election supervisors have also been trained to use Narcan, an antidote to opioid poisoning, after fentanyl-laced letters were sent to the Fulton county board of elections office.

In an attempt to shore up confidence in the voting process, Georgia has joined forces with the “Vet the Vote” campaign, which encourages veterans to become poll workers, in the hope they will be trusted by voters across the political divide.

But Raffensperger is under no illusions that such measures will convert those who believe the conspiracy theories touted by members of his own party.

“Some people just can’t believe that their candidate has come up short,” he said. “I’ve been very clear that no matter how you look at it, there was a race back in 2020 and the 227 Republican congressmen all got more votes in all of their districts than president Trump did. And in Georgia, we saw the same thing . . . People just left the top of the ticket blank.”

Despite coming under repeated attack from Trump, who claimed at the Atlanta rally that Raffensperger was doing “everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win”, the secretary enjoys a higher approval rating in Georgia than the former president.

“People know no matter what, I’m going to do my job,” Raffensperger said, even as he lamented that his “microphone’s not big enough” to drown out voices seeking to inject doubt about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

When asked what would happen if a large number of counties refused to certify the vote in November, Raffensperger smiled ruefully. “Then the judges will be busy.”

BUILDERS renovating a terraced house for BBC TV show Homes Under The Hammer made the next door neighbours’ lives a “misery” for six months.

Ian Gilbert and his housebound partner Rita Owen were woken up almost every day at 7.30am to the noise of a jackhammer, and he claims they were given no prior warning before the work got underway.

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Rita, 84 – a cancer survivor who has other severe health problems – has now moved into a care home as full-time carer Ian, 70, can no longer cope, saying his own health problems were exacerbated by the ordeal.

He is currently awaiting open heart surgery. The next door house, in Crewe, Cheshire, was given a full renovation into a six-bedroom HMO after being sold at auction as part of the show.

Ian said the first he knew about the work was when he saw presenter and ex-footballer Dion Dublin outside doing a piece to camera segment for the programme in October last year.

Construction work began almost immediately and wasn’t completed until April.

Ian told the Sun: “They had no respect for us whatsoever and made our lives a misery for six months.

“They never came and told us anything that was going to happen, there was no communication.

“You’d think they’d have given us a fair bit of warning, but we had nothing at all. It’s shocking. They’ve gone now and that’s it, they’ve done their job. Move onto another one, I suppose.

“They’ve got a nice little programme to put together but don’t think of the consequences for other people.”

Referring to Rita, he continued: “My partner, who is now in a home, was very ill at the time, she was housebound… The noise was terrible.

“I used to go out for a couple of hours on a Monday afternoon for a pint with a mate for a couple of hours of respite.

“I’ve gone back home on the first Monday and she was in a hell of a state. They’ve used a jackhammer right the way along the living room wall. Frightened her to death.

“They didn’t know she was in. This jackhammer carried on for the full length of the term of the renovation, until the last day.”

Ian explained that the next door stairway is “right up against” his living room wall and as there was no carpet it sounded “like a herd of elephants” when the builders arrived each morning.

He said he checked on his local council’s website and such noisy work is only allowed from 8am-6pm Monday to Friday, and from 8am-2pm on Saturday, with nothing on a Sunday.

Ian said: “They did make a lot of noise until I went out and said they shouldn’t be making any noise on a Sunday, so [the lead builder] said we’ll work but we won’t make any noise. I’ve heard that one before.”

Ian joked: “They had rubber hammers in the end.”

The episode was broadcast earlier this month.

Ian said: “It all looked very hunky dory, but no one’s concerned about how we went on.

“What about the poor people who had to put up with it all?”

Referring to Rita, he said: “She was very ill, lucky to still be with us.

“She had very bad heart problems. Before they started I had mild aortic stenosis.

“After all this I’ve gone to severe aortic stenosis because I’ve got worked up about it all. And I’ve got to have open heart surgery now.I’ve got to go see the cardiologist in a week.”

Nick Knowles’ DIY SOS wrecked my home and ‘exploited’ my family

BY ALEX WEST

A MAN whose family home was “wrecked” by DIY SOS says the BBC’s offer of financial help won’t cover the damage.

Peter Chapman, 64, a full-time carer for his wife and daughter, says Nick Knowles and his crew caused £30,000 of destruction at his Gloucestershire home.

He says cock-ups included wall bars on the loo for wheelchair-using wife Sarah, 59, and daughter Suzanne, 39, coming off on the first day.

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And part of the hallway collapsed at their Cheltenham home after the works, he adds.

Both incidents could have been “fatal”, Peter believes.

Following a three-and-a-half year row, Peter has now refused £15,000 in compensation from the BBC, claiming repairs would cost double.

He said: “I wish I’d never heard of DIY SOS. They’ve literally had me in tears. They just don’t want to know.

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“I have been trying to get them to understand the impact their botched attempt at helping me and my family has had on me.

“We’ve been used and well and truly exploited. It was all done for effect.

“There were too many people doing too much, too quickly in appallingly wet conditions.”

Other issues include a leaking roof, which now has buckets catching water, cracks in the patio decking, making it unsafe for Sarah to use her wheelchair and a ramp that is too steep for her wheelchair.

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The 64-year-old also blames the programme for laying a driveway that sank and had to be re-laid, cracks in some of the bungalow’s walls, a lack of insulation in two ceilings and installing a slippery hard floor in the lounge when he wanted to keep carpet.

A BBC spokesperson said: “DIY SOS is a heart-warming programme that brings communities together and helps improve the lives of those in need thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who give up their time to participate.

“As with all of our previous projects, the Charlton Kings build was planned and completed in accordance with the necessary required regulatory approvals and signed off onsite by building control.”

The corporation said that it sought impartial third party advice to assess the property when Mr Chapman declined its offers of help.

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It claimed it offered him various solutions, though Mr Chapman denied this had been the case.

The BBC added that it was aware that Mr Chapman had made his own home improvements since it finished filming, which it had no involvement with.

It said it took its duty of care to its contributors very seriously, offered Mr Chapman support and returned personal items to him.

Read the full story here.

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Rita had cancer 10 years ago and Ian became her full time carer after being made redundant from his job as a welder.

She has been housebound for 18 months.

Asked if he blamed the work or TV show for putting his partner in a home, Ian said: “I wouldn’t say it was down to it completely but I don’t think it’s done her any good.

“She’s sat here all day while this renovation has gone on.

“The heart problems caused her to have water retention in her legs and her legs would swell up terribly. She can’t use her legs again now.

“I couldn’t cope with it anymore, that’s why she’s gone into a home.”

Ian and Rita, who have been together 50 years, have lived at their house for 40 years.

A BBC spokesperson told the Sun: “The Lion TV crew visited the property just twice: once at the beginning, before any renovation work started, and once at the end, after the project was completed.

“The construction work at the property was conducted independently, with no involvement from Homes Under The Hammer beyond these two visits.”

We have also approached Lion TV, which produces the show, and the owner of the home next to Ian’s.

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

I love Steve Coogan. I first saw him the night after he won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1992 where he was appearing as one of his many alter egos, the Mancunian bombshell Pauline Calf. He was scorchingly hilarious, and I’ve been an ardent fan ever since. 

To my mind, Coogan’s most famous creation, the quintessential Little Englander and broadcaster Alan Partridge, remains one of the funniest characters on television, eclipsed only by Coogan’s turn as Himself in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip. I have an infantile weakness for anyone who can do impressions, and enjoy few things in life so much as watching the actor “doing” Roger Moore. Next month sees Coogan in his first major West End role in a restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, another collaboration with Armando Iannucci with whom he has worked for 30 years. He takes time out from rehearsals to talk about the undertaking, which will see him take on four roles (compared to Peter Sellers’ threesome), and a career that has seen him switch between high comedy and more serious parts.

Lately, Coogan has become a style icon – or at least his wardrobe has come to represent a style that typifies the British male. The crumpled linens, tan blazers and Ray-Bans of The Trip were the focus of much discussion about the modern wardrobe, and what might be appropriate for the mature man to wear. For this reason, I’m delighted that he should feature in this autumn’s men’s style issue, which I hope will be a useful and approachable guide. 

Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

In our tailor’s directory, for example, we unpick the bewildering range of services in London dedicated to the making of a suit. While many of our readers are keen to try bespoke suiting, many report feeling overwhelmed when trying to work out who and what will fit them best. Are they looking for something traditional and highly structured, or are they in search of something softer, lighter and with more slouch? Aleks Cvetkovic has put together an index that we hope may help. From the lean, lengthening lines of Edward Sexton to the regal cuts of Kent & Haste, we hope this answers everything you wanted to know about suiting but were afraid to ask.

Not in the market for a three-piece? Maybe a black hoodie is more your vibe. Mark C O’Flaherty has found out how the sporty basic has become akin to haute couture. Likewise, at Sunspel, the T-shirt specialists are debuting a bespoke service to help men (and women) find the perfect fit. We’ve sent Louis Wise to test it out. 

In the 13 years since founding his men’s ready-to-wear label Ami Paris, Alexandre Mattiussi has introduced womenswear, accessories, leather goods and jewellery, and turned his business into a global €300mn brand. His recipe for success has been the provision of a core line in utilitarian trousers, shirts and basics at an aspirational price point. His trousers especially come highly recommended by many of my peers. 

“I’m not a niche designer, I’m not an intellectual designer, I’m not a conceptual designer,” he tells Jessica Beresford. “I want to dress the maximum amount of people I can, in a very inclusive way.” Ami’s success reveals a truth within the industry that many brands don’t seem to hear. Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

Lastly, our cover story takes you on a journey across Croatia, aboard the Jadrolinija ferry with Leon Dame. It’s always a delight to feature my favourite supermodel on these pages: Dame is one of the only people in the world who could wear a bin bag and still look super-chic. 

@jellison22

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