Perplexity Builds Merchant Network to Power Generative AI Commerce
*Source: PYMNTS, March 2025*
Overview
In March 2025, PYMNTS reported (in an exclusive) that Perplexity AI is firmly building out a merchant network to power generative AI commerce. As AI assistants become a new entry point for product discovery, the company is working to establish direct relationships with merchants so its conversational search and shopping experiences can surface accurate, transaction-ready product information.
Key points
- Perplexity is constructing a merchant network to support shopping use cases within its generative AI products.
- The initiative reflects a broader industry trend: AI search platforms competing with traditional search engines as shopping gateways.
- Direct merchant integration helps ensure that AI-generated shopping answers rely on structured, reliable product feeds rather than scraped or incomplete web data.
- The move positions Perplexity within the emerging AI commerce ecosystem, where discovery, recommendation, and checkout are increasingly blended inside conversational interfaces.
- Adobe Analytics: Traffic to U.S. retail websites from Generative AI sources
- Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records
- Foundation Model for Personalized Recommendation by Netflix
Why it matters
For the search and personalization community, this illustrates how LLM-era assistants are extending from information retrieval into transactional flows. Merchant networks, product data quality, and purchase-path integration become core infrastructure for GenAI commerce — much as crawling and ranking were core infrastructure for web search.