SNAP
The AI match that didn’t stick
Snap’s quarterly earnings came with a little relationship status update: the company says its deal with Perplexity is officially over. The partnership, announced last November, was supposed to tuck Perplexity’s AI search engine right into Snapchat. Think of it as giving the app a smart sidekick — except the sidekick never moved in.
Why this matters
For a company like Snap, partnerships like this are a big part of the growth playbook. The app needs more than disappearing photos and dog filters; it needs reasons for users to stick around and for advertisers to care. An AI search integration could’ve helped Snapchat feel more sticky, more useful, and a little less like a nostalgia machine from the 2010s.
What investors should watch
The fact that Snap called the breakup “amicable” is corporate-speak for “no dramatic car chase, just a quiet fade-out.” Still, the bigger takeaway is that the company is still hunting for durable product upgrades that can translate into engagement and revenue.
- No Perplexity integration means one fewer AI-powered feature in the pipe
- Snap still has to prove it can turn product experiments into real monetization
- The market will be watching whether management has a replacement plan, or just another idea board full of Post-its
Big picture: Snap doesn’t need every partnership to work — but it does need at least some of them to become actual products people use.