Data Marketplaces & Intermediaries

Getty signs a global licensing deal with Perplexity — and makes attribution a paid product feature, not an afterthought

Source: Yahoo Finance · Oct 26, 2026

Getty Images and Perplexity have signed a multi-year, global licensing agreement that lets Perplexity surface Getty's creative and editorial imagery — served through Getty's API — directly inside its AI search and answer experiences. The part worth noticing is not that an image library struck a deal; it is how the deal is structured. Crediting and links back to the original source are built into the product interface, so attribution is carried along with the content instead of being quietly discarded the way scraped material usually is.

The context sharpens the point. Perplexity had spent much of the past year fielding accusations of scraping and plagiarism. Choosing to license — and to make the provenance visible in the UI — is a deliberate reversal: it treats paid, attributed content as a feature customers and rights holders can trust, not as compliance overhead bolted on after the fact. Provenance becomes something the product does, out loud, rather than something a legal team hopes nobody asks about.

That shift lands at the same moment the opposite approach is getting more expensive. The copyright suits against model builders keep multiplying, and whatever any single ruling says, the direction of travel is clear: scraping is being litigated while clean, licensed, attributable data is being bought. When the safest and most defensible supply is also the most marketable, the market tilts toward owners who can prove where their data came from and that they have the right to license it.

That is the posture a consented interview and assessment corpus is built for. Data captured with participant consent, documented in its origin, and delivered with per-asset lineage is the training-and-evaluation equivalent of a licensed, credited image: a buyer can see exactly what they are getting and why they are allowed to use it. As attribution and rights move from fine print to product feature, the advantage accrues to whoever treated provenance as foundational from the first recording.

Key Points

• Getty Images signed a multi-year global deal letting Perplexity display Getty's creative and editorial imagery inside its AI answer experiences, delivered through Getty's API
• Crediting and links back to the source are built into the interface, so provenance travels with the content rather than being stripped away
• The deal is notable because Perplexity had been repeatedly accused of scraping and plagiarism — it is now formalizing paid partnerships instead
• Licensed, attributed, API-delivered content is becoming the preferred path precisely as scraping gets litigated