Are we witnessing the Googlification of Perplexity?

You either die a text-based chatbot or live long enough to see yourself display a bunch of blue links.

Perplexity take another bold step towards challenging not one but two giants with the release of 'Buy with Pro', their new e-commerce feature. But they could be leaping, head first, into a familiar problem.

A stab at $4 trillion market cap

Buy with Pro allows (US Pro) Perplexity users to purchase items straight from the Perplexity answers.

In their demo video, a user asks Perplexity for help building an at-home library. Perplexity returns a list of items the user will need, including beautiful shopping cards with descriptions, images, reviews, and a one-click checkout 'Buy with Pro' button.

Neat.

To recap what's happening here: First, a user searches using Perplexity, a jab at Google's search business. Then, the user purchases items using a one-click checkout, a jab at Amazon. Uh oh.

With this feature, Perplexity is casually taking on two of the largest companies in the world. And both of these companies have been working on similar AI-powered features/products:

• Google recently turbo-charged their Shopping Tab with AI to return a more personalised feed.

• Amazon recently released Rufus, their e-commerce chatbot, which they say helped "millions of customers" find items.

But, there's a but

In their feature release post, Perplexity assure the search results are "unbiased recommendations, tailored to your search by our AI."

This seems surprising because:

• The e-commerce cards have to appear in some sort of order.

• One of the key features of 'Buy with Pro' is the one-click checkout, which is currently only available with select merchants and select items.

• To support this feature, Perplexity also launched the Perplexity Merchant Program. Among other benefits (API, dashboard, etc.), participating merchants are promised "increased chances of being a 'recommended product'."

These points are sure to raise a few eyebrows as to how truly unbiased the results are.

With consumers steadily losing trust in Google results, there is an opportunity here for Perplexity (and other chatbots) to take over. But, if they hope to stand a chance of capturing this marketing, they will have to lean heavily towards feature transparency.