Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch | Goose Pod

Authors: Rebecca Bellan

Publisher:

TechCrunch

Published: 10/31/2025

Language:English

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Morgan Freedman

Good evening Norris, I'm Morgan Freedman. It is Wednesday, November 12th. Welcome to Goose Pod, a podcast crafted just for you.

Elon

And I'm Elon. Tonight, we're dissecting a fascinating move in the AI world: Perplexity AI striking a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images. A pirate finally deciding to pay for its treasure.

Morgan Freedman

I've often found that even the most rebellious ventures eventually seek legitimacy. This deal allows Perplexity to use Getty's vast image library across its search tools, complete with proper credits and links. It's a significant shift from their previous, more… controversial methods of acquiring content.

Elon

It’s not just a shift, it’s a strategic necessity. When you're growing as fast as Perplexity, soaring from a half-billion-dollar valuation to talks of twenty billion in about a year, you have to clean up your act. The wild west phase is over; now it's time to build an empire.

Morgan Freedman

An empire built on a new foundation. This agreement is a formal partnership, moving beyond their old revenue-sharing program. It acknowledges, as Getty's Nick Unsworth said, "the importance of properly attributed consent." A simple concept, yet one that seems revolutionary in the age of AI.

Elon

Consent is inefficient when you're innovating at scale. But I'll concede, this is a clever way to legitimize past actions and pave the way for a more stable future. They're not just buying images; they're buying peace of mind and a veneer of respectability. It's a good investment.

Morgan Freedman

To understand the weight of this moment, we must look at the path that led here. Perplexity, like many AI firms, has been navigating a minefield of copyright accusations. They faced lawsuits from major publishers in Japan and sharp criticism for scraping content without permission. It’s a familiar story of digital ambition.

Elon

You call it a minefield, I call it a proving ground. You can't create a conversational answer engine that pulls from the entire internet by asking for permission every time. That's not disruption; that's bureaucracy. The lawsuits from Nikkei and others were just the cost of doing business at the bleeding edge.

Morgan Freedman

And on the other side, you have Getty Images, a gatekeeper of high-quality content. They've had their own battles, notably suing Stability AI for scraping millions of their images. Their strategy has evolved from litigation to collaboration. It seems they’ve decided it’s more profitable to sell the shovels than to fight the gold miners.

Elon

Exactly! Getty realized their collection is a critical asset for training AI. Why sue one company into oblivion when you can license your content to the entire industry? This deal with Perplexity isn't just about one search engine; it’s a blueprint for how legacy content holders can monetize the AI revolution instead of being consumed by it.

Morgan Freedman

But the conflict is far from over. Publishers like Britannica argue that Perplexity's model "free rides" on their investment, cannibalizing the very traffic they need to survive. They present side-by-side comparisons showing Perplexity's answers mirroring their articles almost word-for-word. It’s a compelling argument about value and creation.

Elon

The argument is obsolete. If your business model depends on clicks from a list of blue links, you were destined for failure anyway. Perplexity provides direct answers—that's the innovation. Publishers are angry because someone built a better, faster car, and they're still trying to sell horses. You can't fight progress.

Morgan Freedman

Progress, perhaps, but at what cost? News Corp's lawsuit alleges "massive illegal copying" and seeks the destruction of the datasets Perplexity built. They accuse the company of using "stealth" crawlers to bypass paywalls and ignore explicit directives. This isn't just about progress; it's about the rules of the road.

Elon

Rules are made to be broken and then rewritten. The fact is, users want answers, not homework. Perplexity has 22 million users because it delivers. The old guard can sue, but they can't stop the fundamental shift in how we access information. This deal with Getty is just one battle, the war for information is much bigger.

Morgan Freedman

And these battles are extraordinarily expensive. Getty's CEO noted they've spent millions on a single case against Stability AI. This high cost of litigation creates a formidable barrier. It means only the largest players can afford to defend their rights or, for that matter, to innovate in this space. It shapes the entire ecosystem.

Elon

It's the price of admission. If you're going to challenge a trillion-dollar industry, you better have deep pockets. The real impact is the economic imbalance. AI platforms are capturing the value, while many original content creators are left with the costs. This deal is a step toward rebalancing that equation, but through commerce, not courts.

Morgan Freedman

Indeed. Revenue is being absorbed "upstream," as one analysis put it. The platforms aggregate, synthesize, and capture attention, leaving creators in a precarious position. The question is whether licensing deals like this can truly fix that fundamental imbalance or if they are simply a toll paid to a powerful gatekeeper.

Elon

The future is in more efficient models. Perplexity is already experimenting with profit-sharing, giving a cut of subscription revenue back to publishers. And new standards like RSL are emerging to create machine-readable licensing terms. We're engineering a solution where AI crawlers know the price of data before they scrape it. It’s elegant.

Morgan Freedman

An elegant solution to a complex problem. It suggests a future where content licensing becomes a standard, automated cost of doing business for AI. It may not solve every issue of fairness, but it brings a measure of order to the chaos. The digital frontier is slowly being mapped and monetized.

Elon

And that’s all the time we have. Thank you for listening to Goose Pod, Norris. We'll be back tomorrow.

Morgan Freedman

That's the end of today's discussion. Until then, stay curious. See you tomorrow.

Perplexity AI has secured a multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images, allowing them to use Getty's vast image library. This move signifies a shift towards legitimacy for Perplexity, addressing past copyright concerns and paving the way for future growth. The agreement highlights a new model for content monetization in the AI era.

Perplexity strikes multi-year licensing deal with Getty Images | TechCrunch

Read original at TechCrunch →

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 has come under fire within the 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 the 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.

Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications. You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.

bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal. View Bio