What is Perplexity and what is it used for?
Perplexity is an AI-based search engine that answers questions in natural language and shows the sources it consulted, used to research topics, summarize information and prepare documents.
Each answer carries references to its sources, so the person can check the information. Users can ask follow-up questions to go deeper, upload files such as PDF, CSV, audio, video and images and, on paid plans, choose the AI model that answers. Perplexity uses Sonar, its own model, and the help page also lists third-party models for Pro subscribers.
For longer work, Labs runs projects of 10 minutes or more and generates files and mini-apps, and the research mode (formerly called Deep Research) runs a faster investigation of the topic. Comet is Perplexity's browser.
For developers there is the Sonar API, which adds search with sources to their own applications. For companies there are the Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max plans.
