Perplexity AI

Search engine web portal

Perplexity’s primary offering is an online information retrieval system (search engine) that uses large language models to generate responses to user queries by searching and summarizing web-based content.^[18] Perplexity offers a feature known as Perplexity Pages that generates structured summaries and report-like content from user queries by aggregating cited sources.^[31] Perplexity is available to web users without charge or registration, a freemium model.^[16]

Perplexity Pro

Perplexity Pro is a subscription tier, a more capable paid "enterprise" service, including stronger security and data protection^[16] and additional tools, including the ability to search uploaded documents alongside web content and access to a programmatic application programming interface (API).^[18] It allows the user to select between backend models such as GPT-5.4, Claude 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.^[32] The company has also developed its own models, Sonar (based on Llama 3.3)^[33] and R1 1776 (based on DeepSeek R1).^[34]

Internal Knowledge Search

Internal Knowledge Search enables Pro and Enterprise Pro users to browse web content and their internal documents simultaneously. Moreover, it allows users to upload and search through files in Excel, Word, PDF, and other common file formats. Enterprise Pro users can upload and index up to 500 files.^[35]

Search API

Perplexity's Search API provides AI developers with programmatic access to the company's search infrastructure. The September 2025 release includes a software development kit, an open-source evaluation framework called search_evals, and documentation detailing the API's design and optimization.^[36]

Shopping hub

Perplexity's Shopping Hub is an online shopping platform that provides AI-generated product recommendations and enables users to purchase products directly through Perplexity's interface.^[37][38] It was launched in November 2024 with backing by Amazon and Nvidia.^[37]

Finance

In October 2024, Perplexity AI launched new finance-focused features, including software that provides real-time tracking of stock prices and company earnings data. The tool provides real-time stock quotes and price tracking, industry peer comparisons, and basic financial analysis tools. The platform sources its financial data from Financial Modelling Prep.^[39][40]

Assistant

In January 2025, Perplexity launched the Perplexity Assistant, an AI-powered tool designed to enhance its search engine's functionality. It can perform tasks across multiple apps, such as hailing a ride or searching for a song, and can maintain context across actions.^[15] The assistant is also multi-modal, meaning it can use a phone's camera to provide answers about the user's surroundings or on-screen content.^[15] Perplexity has acknowledged that the assistant is still in development and may not always function as expected. For instance, certain features, such as summarizing unread emails or upcoming calendar events, require users to enable a workaround based on notifications.^[15]

Comet

In July 2025, Perplexity launched Comet, an AI browser based on Chromium. Initially, access to the browser was limited to users subscribed to the most expensive subscription tier.^[41] The browser was later released for free download in October 2025.^[42] A key feature is the integration of the Perplexity search engine,^[43] which can perform a variety of tasks such as generating article summaries, describing an image, conducting research about a topic, and composing emails.^[44]

Truth Social chatbot

Perplexity has been contracted to produce a chatbot for Donald Trump's social media platform Truth Social.^[45]

Perplexity Computer

In February 2026, Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a general-purpose AI agent designed to autonomously perform multi-step tasks using multiple large language models and specialized subagents.^[46] The cloud-based agent can conduct research, browse the web, write and execute code, create applications and other digital content, and interact with external services through software connectors.^[47]

Personal Computer

In April 2026, Perplexity introduced Personal Computer, an extension of Computer designed to operate on a user's local device. The Mac version can work with local files and applications in addition to the web and connected services. In July 2026, Perplexity released Personal Computer for Windows, allowing it to work with local files, Microsoft 365 and web-based services.^[48][49]

Copyright and trademark infringement allegations

In June 2024, Forbes publicly criticized Perplexity for using their content. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some "rough edges" and accepted feedback but maintained that Perplexity only "aggregates" rather than plagiarizes information.^[56][57][58]

In October 2024, The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity demanding that it stop accessing and using NYT content, claiming that Perplexity is violating its copyright by scraping data from its website.^[59] In June 2024, Dow Jones and New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit also alleged that Perplexity harmed their brand by attributing hallucinated quotes, for example, on F-16 jets for Ukraine, to articles that did not include them.^[60][61] On October 24, 2024, Perplexity AI published an official response on its company blog asserting that the claims in the lawsuits were misleading and stating it was open to revenue-sharing arrangements with content providers.^[62] On January 31, 2025, Perplexity was sued in the United States for alleged trademark infringement by Perplexity Solved Solutions (PSS), a software firm founded in 2017.^[63] The lawsuit claims that Perplexity AI's use of the name "Perplexity" violates PSS's federally registered trademark and could cause consumer confusion. PSS had previously declined an offer from Perplexity AI to purchase the trademark in 2023. The suit seeks to prevent Perplexity AI from using the name in its branding and marketing.^[64] In June 2025, UK broadcaster the BBC threatened legal action against Perplexity AI, demanding that the company stop the unauthorized scraping of its content, delete all retained BBC material used in training its models, and provide financial compensation for the infringement of its intellectual property rights.^[65] On August 8, 2025, the Japanese newspaper company Yomiuri Shimbun filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for "free-riding" use of 120,000 articles of the publication from February to June 2025.^[66] Later that month, two more Japanese newspaper companies, The Asahi Shimbun and The Nikkei, also sued the company for alleged copyright infringement.^[67]

In October 2025, Reddit sued Perplexity in federal court in New York, alleging that it and three other companies unlawfully scraped its data.^[68]

Stealth web crawlers

In June 2024, separate investigations by the magazine Wired and web developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity does not respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol (or robots.txt) standard, which may include requests for web crawlers to not scrape sections of the site's content, despite Perplexity claiming the opposite. While Perplexity publicly lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of its web crawlers, Wired and Robb Knight claim that it uses undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt.^[12][69] In response, Srinivas stated that Perplexity was not ignoring robots.txt, but suggested that it relied on third-party web crawlers that do.^[70] When asked, Srinivas declined to commit to cease scraping Wired content using third parties.^[70]

In August 2025, Cloudflare published research revealing that Perplexity was using undeclared "stealth" web crawlers to bypass web application firewalls intended to block Perplexity crawlers, and did not respect robots.txt files.^[13][71] Among others, Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that Perplexity acts "more like North Korean hackers" than a reputable AI company.^[72] Perplexity publicly denied the claims, labeling them as a "charlatan publicity stunt."^[73]