You may have heard that Amazon is suing Perplexity, alleging that Perplexity’s Comet browser violates the e-commerce giant’s terms of service. Amazon goes even further, though, as an article from The Verge points out:

Amazon’s statement says third-party applications that purchase products for customers on its site “should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and claims the comment provides "a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”

Amazon knows better than just about anyone that gatekeepers gonna gate… and that a consequence of those gatekeepers’ actions often is “a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience.” Of course Amazon knows this. They practically invented the practice.

This lawsuit—and Amazon’s comments about AI’s effects on shopping and customer experience—tell us a ton about the future of AI and marketing. They highlight some core lessons we all need to learn about where we might be headed. And they provide a roadmap for how to respond.

What are those lessons? What does Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity tell us about the future of AI and marketing? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

Here are the show notes for you.

What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing (Episode 476) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links

• Why every AI search study tells a different story
• What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474)
• Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473)
• In the Age of AI, Brand Isn’t Everything. It’s the Only Thing (Episode 472)
• Are ChatGPT’s Apps Good for Your Business? (Episode 471)
• Will Agentic AI Kill Your Content Marketing? (Episode 470)
• The New SEO? (Episode 469)
• AI and Zero-Click Search: The Real Story (Episode 467)
• The Rise of Agentic AI Among Your Customers (Episode 466)
• The Brand is the Prompt (Thinks Out Loud 465)
• Google Says You Should Not Use AI To Create Content… Kind Of (Thinks Out Loud 457) – Tim Peter & Associates
• AI Can’t Save Bad Strategy: Why Fundamentals Still Matter in 2025 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 455)
• AI, Content, and Revenue: Why Clicks Are Overrated (Thinks Out Loud Episode 450)

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Transcript: What Amazon’s Perplexity Lawsuit Means for the Future of AI and Marketing

Anyone who’s listened to the show has heard me say that gatekeepers gonna gate. That’s what they do. Right now, three years after the launch of ChatGPT, there is not a gatekeeper for artificial intelligence. There’s too many players out there. The market is super unsettled.

ChatGPT and Google and Meta could all make the claim that they’re the most used AI and those three, plus Perplexity or Claude could suggest that they are the most capable AI. They’re all kind of fighting for the same leadership crown and they all need to become the winner. They need this because they need to make more money, right?

And to do that, first they have to put the AI, they have to put their artificial intelligence in front of more people. They have to get more people to use it. It’s a distribution challenge.

That’s why you’re seeing things like the launch of AI browsers like ChatGPT Atlas or Perplexity Comet or Microsoft and Google embedding Copilot and Gemini into Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, respectively. And the browser is a core part of what I want to talk about today. So I’m going to come back to that in just a moment.

We are, of course, also seeing folks like Microsoft and Google putting Copilot and Gemini into all of their products. Again, they’re trying to solve for distribution.

When you have distribution, you also need some degree of monetization. Every single one of these players needs to find the right monetization strategy that covers their massive, massive and accelerating costs—and drives profits. Now they don’t need this immediately, but every single one of these suppliers, every single one of these tech companies, needs to show investors that they’ll have some path to profits someday.

And then of course the third leg of the stool around adoption here is that they have to provide functionality, they have to provide utility. Putting AI tools in front of customers doesn’t matter if customers don’t actually use them very often and customers won’t use them if they feel the AI doesn’t provide them utility. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even declared a "code red" because of his concern that Google’s functionality is gaining on them.

Now, I think that the launch of the AI browsers—Atlas, Comet, Gemini in Chrome—are one way that many of these companies are trying to solve for the utility and distribution problems.

I also think that these are the true beginning of agentic AI. You simply tell the browser to do work for you. You don’t even go to a website. You just say, "hey, go take care of this for me." And if you, the customer, find that the browser does the work for you, you might use it more often. And you might prefer a browser like Atlas or like Comet over Chrome or Safari. Agentic AI might be the true AI gatekeeper that we’re going to run into. I’m pretty confident that’s the most likely scenario.

So, by the way, is Amazon. Amazon is suing Perplexity to prevent their browser, Comet, from using its agentic capabilities to shop and purchase on Amazon.

Why?

Because Amazon knows that gatekeepers gonna gate more than just about anyone. Amazon, along with Google and Meta and Apple and Microsoft, essentially invented the practice of gatekeeping for the internet age.

And this lawsuit, this action that Amazon is taking, should be a massive wake-up call about the risks that agentic AI poses to your brand and to your business. Amazon being worried enough about this to take Perplexity to court is a flashing red light signaling all of us that big changes are coming.

This is episode 476 of The Big Show. Today we’re looking at what Amazon’s lawsuit tells us about the future of AI and about the future of marketing more broadly. Let’s dive in.

There’s a great article over on The Verge about Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity, and it includes the following banger quote. This is from The Verge.

Amazon’s statement says third-party applications that purchase products for customers on its site “should respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” and claims the comment provides "a significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience”

A "significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience." Amazon clearly recognizes the same threat around AI agents that I do and I think many of you do.

Those agents will make it harder for companies to create great distinct experiences that help us build long-term trust and relationships with our customers. We can ignore for a moment whether most companies actually do this or not, but the reality is that’s what we need to do.

Amazon recognizes that Comet—and really, any agentic experience—can turn Amazon into a commodity. They’re scared. And they probably should be. At least to some degree, you should probably be a little concerned too. I don’t want you to be scared. My job here is not to scare you. But we need to be honest about what’s happening here.

Agentic AI, whether delivered through a web browser, an app, or built into our device’s operating system will likely determine who wins and who loses at a level we’ve never seen before.

Yes, customers have started their journeys for years using search and social. But “search" and “social" represent two entirely different platforms. And each of those have more or less more than one player.

Obviously, there’s a dominant player. Sure, customers search on Google. But they also search, among others, on Bing and Expedia and Booking.com and OpenTable and Yelp and G2… and sure, Google and YouTube and Google Maps. Google is the biggest one. But there have long been places where you can have your brand show up beyond just Google.

Social has been dominated by Meta for a long time, via Facebook and Instagram. But Pinterest and YouTube and Snapchat and Reddit all existed even before TikTok came along to really shake things up. Again, you had a number of options for getting your product or your service and your brand in front of customers.

Once customers use AI agents, though, they likely will stick with just one or two of them. Probably. And in my view, probably, the ones they’ll use will be the one or two integrated into their phone or their laptop or smart wearables like glasses and earbuds or the very small number of apps they still choose such as their browser and email.

By the way, as a quick aside, this is one of the reasons that I think Google is in such a great position here. They already own and offer most of these services. Microsoft has a less secure position with home Windows consumers, but they have a great position with enterprise users for the same reason. And Meta is doing its best to win the wearables race and own the next device experience. Finally, whomever Apple partners with has a huge chance to win those customers. It could be OpenAI, it could be Google, it could be someone else. I’ve kind of been joking with a friend of mine that, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI buys Apple or Apple buys OpenAI. Right? Because that would be the perfect marriage from that perspective.

The point remains that the agent, regardless of where customers interact with it, will likely be the next major gatekeeper. And that’s why Amazon is trying to nip Perplexity in the bud here.

Now, the real key for you though is what do you do about it? Well, you want to remember that your brand is the prompt. That’s what we’re trying to work towards. And also remember that "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels" are still key to building brand equity among customers. They’re still the key to having customers ask for you by name.

Now, if you don’t remember "The King, The Queen, And The Crown Jewels,” they are "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels".

All three of those start with focusing on your customer. Your content needs to think about your customer’s needs and how you solve for those needs every single time.

• What are your customers’ problems?
• Where do they need help?
• How do you help them solve their problems?
• And finally, what is your point of view that sets you apart from your competitors?

We of course also need to think about content distribution. How do you deliver that content to customers? Well, first and foremost, especially in the age of AI, content distribution has to start with CRM. And your website has to be a machine for getting customers to talk to you directly. In a perfect world, everyone who comes to your website will sign up for your email or will sign up for SMS. On your website, you have to think about website conversions not just in terms of selling product, but in terms of getting customers to connect directly with you. Again, via email, via SMS, or via social follows.

You also want to look at chat on your site and the website search on your site so that you’re providing the same kind of experience customers expect when they connect with any company anywhere.

Of course, your own website is still going to be a place where your content lives, but you also need to make sure your content is available on social for the customers who are engaging there.

And finally, you need to ensure your customers tell a great brand story on your behalf when they’re on social. And that’s where customer experience comes in.

We’ve seen for years that customers will tell their friends and family and fans and followers about experiences they’ve had, good or bad, at almost every social opportunity. Sure, online, but also in group chats and face-to-face and even in casual encounters sometimes, if there’s a chance that they’ve got a good story to tell.

It’s really critical for you to make sure that the story they’re telling about your brand is a positive one. That’s why customer experience matters so much. It’s why customer experience is queen.

Finally, pay attention to your data. Obviously, we’re already starting to see shifts in traffic from AI or AI browsers. We’re seeing traffic show up in all kinds of ways.

One of the main metrics I would encourage you to think about is something we call "prompt brand equity." I talked about this a couple of weeks ago in "What Your Brand Is The Prompt Really Means For Your Business." And that’ll be linked to in the show notes.

Your data is going to be more valuable than syndicated or proprietary vendor research. There’s a fantastic article over on Search Engine Land about why this point matters so much. Essentially the idea is that most of this research is measuring different characteristics and that many of the specific narratives that they’re trying to tell are somewhat tied to their business objectives. They’re somewhat tied to the question that they ask and somewhat tied to what are they trying to accomplish with this research. It doesn’t mean that they’re faking the research. It doesn’t mean that they’re trying to lie to you with the research. It just means they’re coming from a specific lens. That’s why your data is going to tell you more than other data you see out there.

Now, if that “content, customer experience, data, King, Queen, Crown Jewels” sounds like a framework you’ve heard about before, either here or in my book, Digital Reset, there’s a reason for that. And that’s because it’s based on tons of research into the way your customers act in a digital environment.

AI is a new platform, but ultimately customer behaviors are still going to drive where we end up. Our job is to put customers first and make sure we’re not letting someone else get between our customers and our businesses.

Amazon gets that. They also get that:

A.) Gatekeeper’s gonna gate.
B.) That agentic AI—probably delivered through a browser for now—is (probably) the next gatekeeper, and…
C.) That they need to act today to ensure that customers keep asking for my name.

While I’m not suggesting you sue Perplexity or anyone else, I would take a page out of Amazon’s playbook and act now to ensure you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of a new gatekeeper’s new gate.

The shift is coming. The time to act is now. Take the right actions today.

Focus on your content, your customer experience, your data and your customer and you should end up in a really good position.

Keep me posted. I can’t wait to see how well you do.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? And let them know what you think, too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 476, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And as always, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, something that goes deeper into this topic, I would love to suggest