Creating a free account lets you search your chat history and past conversations. This versatility helps tailor results to the nature of the query – e.g. researching scholarly information vs. getting public opinions. For instance, you can enable modes to prioritize academic sources, news sites, or even community forums like Reddit.
The AI model itself also has biases learned from training data. If the underlying web content on a topic is biased or skewed, the answer will reflect that. These domain-specific tools show how the AI can be tuned for particular verticals, giving more structured results when you’re doing tasks like shopping research or financial queries. The model also has the ability to generate content in various forms. This is useful if you want to revisit previous answers or build on earlier queries.
Top 10 Buy and Sell Apps & How to Build a Marketplace Like Them
In October 2025, Reddit sued Perplexity in federal court in New York, alleging that it and three other companies unlawfully scraped its data. Later that month, two more Japanese newspaper companies, The Asahi Shimbun and The Nikkei, also filed lawsuit against the company for alleged copyright infringement. On August 8, 2025, the Japanese newspaper company Yomiuri Shimbun filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for “free-riding” of 120,000 articles of the publication from February to June 2025. It stated that the complaints are misleading and reiterated that it was open to revenue-sharing programs.
When was Perplexity released?
The lawsuit also alleges that Perplexity attributed quotes to an article on F-16 jets for Ukraine that never appeared in the original article. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. He previously held research positions at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Perplexity has been contracted to produce a chatbot for Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social.
Getting started with Perplexity
Offering real-time search backed up with citations and sources makes Perplexity AI stand out. It has been described as a research partner or search companion that uses natural language processing (NLP) to interpret and understand the intent of your search, enabling it to offer personalized, relevant recommendations based on your interactions with the model. Unlike static AI models, Perplexity retrieves live information from the web and provides citations for transparency, making it ideal for tasks where accuracy and recency are critical. Perplexity AI isn’t just a smarter search engine — it’s a versatile tool that can adapt to a wide range of professional, academic, and personal needs. While Perplexity AI and ChatGPT are both powered by large language models, they are designed with different purposes in mind.
- Around 2 million users from around the globe visit Perplexity AI each day.
- I recently wrote about the massive shift happening in the browser world, and how AI-powered skills and shortcuts have dramatically changed the experience.
- This flexible pricing allows users to start free and scale up as their needs grow.
- The following January, Perplexity released new features for Ask, including up-to-date sourcing in its replies and the ability for the user to ask follow-up questions.
GPT-5 is one of the smartest AI models ever, here’s what you need to know
Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources. Use profiles to select personalised content. Create profiles to personalise content. Perplexity is a powerful tool with quite a few really specific and useful features.
The release in September 2025 includes a software development kit, an open-source evaluation framework called search_evals, and documentation detailing the API’s design and optimization. Users can upload and search through Excel, Word, PDF, and other common file formats. In July 2024, Perplexity announced the launch of a new publishers’ program to share ad revenue with partners. By April 2024, Perplexity had raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion. Another thing to daman game be mindful of, like with any AI tool, is you can’t fully rely on Perplexity for privacy.
It is an online shopping platform that includes AI-generated product recommendations and enables users to purchase products directly through Perplexity’s interface. The company has also developed its own models Sonar (based on Llama 3.3) and R (based on DeepSeek R1). It allows the user to select between backend models such as GPT-5, GPT-4.1, o4-mini, Claude 4.0, Grok 4 and Gemini Pro 3.
- Sometimes you can access them in advance via Perplexity Labs, its research tool that allows users to provide feedback on tools that are currently in process.
- The feature breaks down complex questions into smaller subtasks, pulls from academic papers, technical sources and long-form articles and compiles it all into a detailed report, often in just a few minutes.
- Just click the Sign Up button in the lower-left corner of the screen, link either your Google or Apple account (or use a single sign-on with your company email account), and away you go.
- If you want to try Perplexity for yourself, head over to perplexity.ai/.
What is Perplexity? Everything you need to know about the ‘answer machine’
It’s not trying to replace search engines entirely; it’s trying to give a better first-draft answer — one you can rely on or dive deeper from. After referring to several sources, it then summarizes the data it finds to give you the most relevant answer. As it develops and competitors enhance their features, we are sure to see boundaries continually pushed towards what a “search engine” can do in the AI era.
Perplexity incorporates a freemium model for individual users, while a paid enterprise service is also available. It launched its main search engine on December 7, 2022, and has since released a Google Chrome extension and an app for iOS and Android. The company says it logs use and may store prompts for research and improvement purposes, although there’s an option to use “incognito mode” for private searches or opt out completely in settings.
In a short time, it has grown from a scrappy startup into a fast-evolving generative AI tool with pro features and an agentic AI shopping assistant that can make purchases on your behalf. January 2025 saw the launch of Perplexity Assistant, an AI powered tool to enhance the functionality of the search engine, allowing you to use it more like a regular AI chatbot if you’d prefer. When reliable, up-to-date information with easily verifiable sources is a priority, consider using Perplexity as your AI-powered search engine.
What is Perplexity AI? — everything there is to know about the search engine and chatbot
As the AI space continues to evolve, Perplexity’s focus on transparency and real-time knowledge could set the standard for the next generation of AI-powered search. Whether you’re a student, business owner, researcher, or simply someone who values precise answers, Perplexity AI offers a unique blend of speed, depth, and credibility. From finding the healthiest breakfast options to comparing product reviews, Perplexity delivers quick, trustworthy answers for personal use. Students, educators, and researchers can use Perplexity to find credible information with cited sources, reducing the time spent filtering through irrelevant or outdated materials. ChatGPT is a conversational AI primarily trained on pre-existing data, while Perplexity AI combines conversational AI with real-time web search and cited responses.
How to Search on Perplexity AI
Perplexity also introduced a voice assistant for iOS, offering hands-free answers at a time when Apple was still holding off on its own AI features. Now, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and even Claude (because it can access the internet) are adding citations with deep research features. Perplexity calls itself the world’s first “answer engine” that uses large language models to understand and give you direct, detailed responses to your questions. It has amassed 22 million active users across its website and app, while its mobile app has been downloaded 13.9 million times since its launch. There are apps for the search engine which can be used on Mac desktop, as well as on iOS and Android. You can access the basic search capabilities which are quick searches with citations and follow up-queries for free.
We take you through what exactly Perplexity is, how it works, what sets it apart from ChatGPT and other gen AI tools — and about some of the legal battles it’s facing.
Join the Tom’s Guide Club for quick access.Enter your email below and we’ll send confirmation, and sign you up to our newsletter. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that Perplexity acts “more like North Korean hackers” than like a reputable AI company. When asked, Srinivas declined to say that Perplexity would cease scraping Wired content using third parties. Perplexity also lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of their web crawlers publicly, but according to Wired and Robb Knight, they use undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt.