Perplexity is the second-heaviest App Store advertiser among EU AI assistants, behind only a wrapper app. It ran 3,184 ad records across the EU in the last year. Yet its whole program rests on one bet: a single English line, "Ask. Research. Trusted Answers", that has stayed live 283 days across 20 countries and is still running as of 15 July 2026.
Everything below comes from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires. It shows every App Store ad an advertiser ran, where, and for how long. Data window ends 16 July 2026.
One line, run wide, for most of a year
Perplexity ran 21 distinct creatives in the window, a modest count for the second-biggest spender in the category. The reason the record total is so high is repetition, not variety: it runs a small set of lines across up to 20 EU storefronts and keeps them up.
The flagship "Ask. Research. Trusted Answers" started on 5 October 2025 and has not stopped since. Three words, three promises, and the third one is the differentiator. Perplexity does not sell "a chatbot"; it sells answers you can trust because they cite sources. The ad names the thing the product does better than a raw chat app, and it has left that line running long enough to prove it converts.
Compare that to ChatGPT, which ran 63 creatives in the same window and let its own year-long line stop in April 2026. The incumbent churns hooks and commits to none for long. Perplexity found one and rode it.
The native-language layer, added in spring 2026
For its first five months the English line carried the whole EU push. Then, from March 2026, Perplexity started bolting on native-language creatives in the biggest markets, and the message shifts when it translates:
- German, from 6 March 2026: "Suchen und Entdecken mit KI" (search and discover with AI), 131 days and still live.
- Portuguese, from 26 March 2026: "Respostas precisas aqui" (precise answers here), 111 days and still live.
- Spanish, from 21 April 2026: "Respuestas precisas a todo" (precise answers to everything), still live.
- Italian, from 21 April 2026: "Chiedi qualsiasi cosa" (ask anything), still live.
- French, from 18 May 2026: "Perplexity, Recherche avec IA" (Perplexity, search with AI).
Read the translations together. The English hero leads with research and trust. The local lines lead with search and precise answers. In-language, Perplexity positions squarely against the default search box people already use, not against other chatbots. That is a deliberate frame, and it only appears once you read the ads in the language they run in.
Where the money goes
Almost all of Perplexity's spend is App Store search results, the slot after a typed query: 1,145 of the analyzed records ran there, against 85 on the search tab and 20 on product pages. It is not buying the editorial front page the way ChatGPT and Gemini do. It is buying intent, the moment someone types "AI", "search", or a rival's name, and putting a durable, trusted-answers promise in front of it.
What a founder can take from this
Three things transfer to a smaller app.
Commit to a winner. Perplexity's best ad has run 283 days. Most founders kill an ad at two weeks out of boredom. Longevity is the signal; if a line is still paying after months, the mistake is turning it off, not leaving it on.
Translate the markets that earn it, later. Perplexity ran English-only for five months, proved the line, then translated into German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French, in that order. Translation came after the winner was known, not before, and only in the markets big enough to justify the creative work.
Say the differentiator, not the category. "Trusted Answers" and "precise answers" both sell the one thing the product does that a generic chat app does not. Your ad has one line. Spend it on what makes you different, not on the word everyone in your category already uses.
See any advertiser's ads yourself
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Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), across 25 EU storefronts, data window ending 16 July 2026. Record counts are what the repository reports for the advertiser; per-country slices return the most recent records, so the analyzed sample can be smaller than the repository total. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Translations are literal glosses, not Perplexity's own wording. We invented no numbers beyond what the repository reports.