President Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media, is beta-testing an AI search feature on the Truth Social platform, drawing on Perplexity’s AI technology.
The new Truth Search AI feature is available now on the web version of Truth Social and will begin public beta testing on its iOS and Android apps at an unnamed future date, the Florida-based company said Wednesday.
“We plan to robustly refine and expand our search function based on user feedback as we implement a wide range of additional enhancements to the platform,” Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said in a statement.
Generative AI technology has been upending traditional internet search, which has been dominated by Google for decades. Rather than responding to your queries with a list of links to websites that you then have to dig through for information, AI chatbot-powered search quickly synthesizes its findings into summaries in conversational language. Perplexity, a startup, has been focused on AI search since its inception. Gen AI powerhouse OpenAI, meanwhile, has been tailoring its ChatGPT technology to provide more search-like features, and Google itself has been weaving its Gemini AI into its popular search service.
Trump Media and Technology Group is perhaps best known for its social media program, Truth Social. The company is separate from the New York-based Trump Organization.
Representatives for Trump Media and Perplexity didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Will results be politically biased?
In today’s divided political landscape, one immediate concern is that a search engine from a conservative president’s media company will select only search results that favor conservative opinions.
UAE state-owned newspaper The National conducted searches using the new product and reported that the AI-generated answers, perhaps unsurprisingly, source conservative-leaning media outlets.
But 404Media was able to get some possibly surprising results. When reporters asked how the American economy is doing, the new search engine said it was “currently facing significant headwinds, with signs of slowdown.”
The media outlet pressed further, asking if the president’s international tariffs are to blame.
“Recent tariff increases in the United States have generally had a negative effect on economic growth and employment, raising costs for businesses and consumers while providing only limited benefits to some manufacturing sectors,” Truth Search AI replied.
Read more: What Is Perplexity? Here’s Everything You Need to Know About This AI Chatbot
Perplexity’s history
San Francisco-based Perplexity was founded in 2022 and has billed itself as the world’s first “answer engine.” Instead of showing a list of links, it pulls info directly from the sources and summarizes that information.
The company has made headlines for how it acquires its content. In June, the BBC threatened to sue Perplexity for unauthorized use of its content, alleging the artificial intelligence company reproduced BBC material “verbatim.”
At the time, Perplexity gave a statement to the Financial Times calling the BBC’s claims “manipulative and opportunistic” and said that the broadcasting giant fundamentally doesn’t understand how the technology, internet or IP law works. Perplexity also alleged that the threat of litigation shows “how far the BBC is willing to go to preserve Google’s illegal monopoly for its own self-interest.”
The New York Times, the New York Post and Forbes have all accused Perplexity of plagiarism. Wall Street Journal publisher Down Jones, along with the New York Post, sued Perplexity in 2024 for copyright infringement.
