Perplexity Targets Travel and Enterprise

Perplexity is trying to escape the fate of becoming a thin wrapper on top of someone else’s model by moving into workflows where distribution, intent, and proprietary product design matter more than raw model quality. Travel and shopping are useful because they turn search into a money making action, while enterprise adds seats, admin controls, internal data connections, and higher switching costs than a consumer chat app.

• The consumer move is not just about answering more questions. In March 2025 Perplexity added visual search for hotels and travel, which opens a path to Kayak style cost per click economics, with estimated travel clicks worth about $1.50 to $3.00 each.
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• The go upmarket move changes the product from a personal answer engine into a team research system. Perplexity Enterprise is sold per seat, includes SSO, user management, no training on customer data, and search across web, team files, and work apps.
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• Bundling pressure is real from both sides. Model labs can fold search into chat, and platform companies can preinstall assistants. Perplexity’s Deutsche Telekom deal gave it distribution on an AI phone and access to a large mobile channel, which matters when Google and OpenAI are both racing for default surface area.
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The next phase is a fight to own high intent interfaces before search gets fully absorbed into foundation model bundles. If Perplexity keeps turning answers into actions in verticals like travel, shopping, and work research, it can evolve from an AI search app into a transaction and workflow layer with much thicker revenue streams and defensibility.