Dec 5 (Reuters) - AI search startup Perplexity said on Thursday it was adding more than a dozen new media partners, including the Los Angeles Times and The Independent, to its program where it shares a portion of ad revenue with the publishers.

In its first set of partners from regions including Japan, Spain and Latin America, Perplexity said companies such as Prisa Media and Newspicks will now be part of the publishers' program, joining existing partners like TIME, Der Spiegel and Fortune.

"With these new partners ... (Perplexity can) provide insights that resonate with users from different backgrounds and geographies. Their participation ensures that our responses to user queries remain comprehensive (and) nuanced," Perplexity said in a statement.

The firm, backed by Amazon AMZN.O founder Jeff Bezos and leading AI chipmaker Nvidia NVDA.O, launched the program in July, which involves sharing ad revenue from interactions when a publisher's content is referenced.

The program also gives publishers access to Perplexity's Application Programming Interface, or API, which allows software programs to interact with each other, and also provides data analytics to track trends and content performance.

The move comes at a time when Perplexity is in a legal tussle with News Corp-owned NWSA.O publishers, with Dow Jones and New York Post suing the company in October, claiming it engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their copyrighted work.

New York Times NYT.N has also sent Perplexity a "cease and desist" notice, demanding it stop using the newspaper's content for generative AI purposes.

Perplexity, one of the firms attempting to disrupt the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google, has started testing advertising on its AI-powered search platform.

(Reporting by Priyanka.G and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore)

((Priyanka.G@thomsonreuters.com;))