A new AI darling is making waves in Silicon Valley. It's called confusion and reports say that both Meta and Apple are quietly exploring to get it. The startup, which has been valued at a staggering $14 billion following the funding round in May, is being hailed as an innovative threat to Google Search's search domination.
But here's it: it mainly summarises the results of the web and sends the link.
So why are you so crazy?
Perplexity charged us with “Answer Engine.” When you ask questions, you use a large language model to spit out a summary of human sounds with footnotes. Basically, there is a chat with bibliography. You might seek the best books on the French Revolution and the collapse of genius acts. In seconds, generate a paragraph containing a link to Wikipedia, news outlets, or reddit threads.
Its pitch is a cleaner, ad-free, chatbot-driven search experience. There's no SEO junk or scrolling.
But critics say it's just a glorious rapper around Google and Openai's APIs, with minimal unique technology and plenty of smoke. Fast, clean and smooth. But they argue, at the heart of it, it's mostly just a reorganization of the Internet.
Big Tech's Obsession
It doesn't stop the hype. In May 2025, the San Francisco, California-based company concluded an additional $500 million funding round, a sharp rise from its $9 billion valuation in December 2024.
And now the high-tech giant is turning. According to Bloomberg, Apple is discussing winning confusion. Meta reportedly considered the move, but no official offer has been confirmed.
The logic is clear. Confusion is growing rapidly, especially among high-tech influencers and X-power users, as “Google Killer.” Traffic to the site has exploded in recent months. The company currently offers Chrome extensions, mobile apps, and Pro versions that allow users to access top-tier AI models such as GPT-4 and Claude.
Still, it's unclear what is worth $14 billion, except for the fact that it's riding a wave of AI.
Why AI skeptics are rolling their eyes
For AI skeptics, the rise in Perplexity is another example of a substance that outweighs the hype. The site does not train its own models. We are not building new infrastructure. It does not revolutionize your search. It simply provides a sophisticated interface for asking questions and getting generated summaries to AI pulled from public websites.
There is also growing concern about how the information is bewildered. Many news organizations, including The New York Times, Forbes and Wired, accused them of plagiarizing and shaking content without permission or proper attribution. Journalists and publishers have warned that this type of AI-powered search experience cannibalize news traffic while still barely returning to content creators.
On June 20th, the BBC became the latest outlet to threaten legal action against bewildered AI, claiming it was using BBC content to train a “default AI model,” according to the Financial Times.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas defends the company as an “information aggregator.” In July 2024, the startup launched a revenue sharing program to deal with the rebound. “We've always believed that the whole internet can build a system that wins,” Srinivas said at the time.
So why the gold rush?
Simple. Searching is money. Google won $50.7 billion from search ads in the first quarter, up 9.8% from the previous year. If the bewilderment can be persuaded to switch even a small number of users' shares before monetizing the experience, it becomes a real threat. Apple and Meta are both increasingly wary of relying on Google, but see the confusion as a quick track to the AI search race.
But the stakes get even deeper. Anyone who controls the following search interface controls the user: Just as Google replaced Yahoo, confusion could theoretically replace Google. That's why Big Tech wants, even if it's not entirely clear what they're buying.
