A Vision for Rebuilding TikTok in America

At Perplexity, our mission has always been to serve the world's curiosity through accurate, transparent, and accessible information. Since our founding back in 2022 by a group of AI researchers, our focus has been on becoming the best answer engine in the world.

TikTok has emerged as one of the most significant platforms for authentic creative expression and content discovery, connecting millions of users worldwide. And we think Perplexity can make TikTok even better.

We’re excited to share the future we envision: a TikTok that is more useful for everyone, where users have easy-to-use tools that let them go deep and seek truth, powered by the best answer engine in the world.

Building a Transparent Algorithm in America

Perplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence. Any acquisition by a consortium of investors could in effect keep ByteDance in control of the algorithm, while any acquisition by a competitor would likely create a monopoly in the short form video and information space. All of society benefits when content feeds are liberated from the manipulations of foreign governments and globalist monopolists.

TikTok’s "For You" feed is personalized to each user and building a real-time recommendation system is vital to keeping a short video platform fresh and fun to use. Perplexity would start by building these basic systems to ensure users maintain a seamless experience. This infrastructure would be developed and maintained in American data centers with American oversight, ensuring alignment with domestic privacy standards and regulations.

The TikTok algorithm today is a black box. We believe these recommendation systems should be transparent. To eliminate risks of user manipulation, we propose rebuilding TikTok’s algorithm from the ground up with transparency as the guiding principle. Our promise is to turn TikTok into the most neutral and trusted platform in the world. To achieve this, we commit not only to developing a new algorithm but also to making the TikTok For You feed open source.

Upgrading to World-Class AI infrastructure

The advanced AI infrastructure run by Perplexity, powered by Nvidia Dynamo (announced at the 2025 Nvidia GPU Technology Conference and mentioning Perplexity as a favorite partner), could easily scale TikTok's recommender models 100x while achieving faster inference speed, raising the bar on TikTok’s recommendation system and making it the best in the world.

Enhancing Trust in TikTok with Perplexity’s Citations and Community Note Features

All answers on Perplexity include citations, which we believe is fundamental to creating a trusted information ecosystem. As a first step, Perplexity would immediately extend this capability to TikTok videos, making it easy for users to cross-reference information in realtime as they watch videos.

We could develop the most powerful context system in the world. One that leverages both community feedback and AI capabilities to highlight reliable information. This approach would be similar to our @AskPerplexity account on X, which has gained over 130K followers and provides contextual information to thousands of users daily. By bringing similar capabilities to TikTok, we could ensure that users have access to world class information tools while scrolling their "For You" feed.

Creating the Best “search box” in the World

Combining Perplexity’s answer engine with TikTok’s extensive video library would allow us to build the best search experience in the world, providing both TikTok and Perplexity users to the answers they seek, anywhere, anytime, no matter the medium.

• Enhancing TikTok search with Perplexity's answer engine: This would provide users with comprehensive, well-cited answers that combine the best answer engine in the world with one of the largest libraries of user generated content.

• Bringing TikTok videos to Perplexity: At the same time, Perplexity’s answers would be enriched with TikTok videos to bring the relevant pieces of content into pro, reasoning and deep research.

Whether you’re searching for the best tennis racket under $100, trying to understand the impact of an earnings call on a stock, or want to know the places where locals like to eat — we’ll always focus on getting you to the best result possible.

Making TikTok Useful for Everyone

Beyond building the infrastructure, our first priority would be enhancing the informational value of content that users discover on TikTok. We believe that time spent on the platform should feel worthwhile, with metrics and optimization focused on user satisfaction and informational value rather than solely engagement.

For users who choose to connect their Perplexity and TikTok accounts, we could leverage cross-platform signals to improve personalization. Perplexity's understanding of user interests through questions and spaces could help surface more relevant content on TikTok. Similarly, content preferences on TikTok could inform more personalized answers on Perplexity.

Enriching Content with AI

Perplexity's LLM orchestration can transform the TikTok experience by enriching videos with contextual information and even multilingual capabilities. Through automatic translation and annotation, creators could easily expand their reach to global audiences.

For users, this would deliver both breadth and depth—providing access to more diverse content while enabling deeper exploration of topics that capture their curiosity. Imagine watching a video about quantum physics and being able to initiate an in-depth research query directly from that content. This integration would allow users to seamlessly transition between TikTok's scrolling experience and Perplexity's powerful research capabilities—all within a single, unified feed.

From rebuilding an open-source "For You" algorithm to enhancing personalization with the latest AI infrastructure, we’re excited about the possibilities TikTok could achieve. Combining Perplexity’s expertise in delivering accurate, trustworthy answers with TikTok’s vibrant, creative community and extensive video library, would be a win for everyone. A TikTok rebuilt and powered by Perplexity would create the world's greatest platform for creativity and knowledge discovery.