Perplexity

In short: Perplexity is ai assistants, content writing and competitor research software, with freemium pricing and plans from $20/month.

AI answer engine with cited web search, used for research and AI visibility checks

Perplexity is an AI answer engine made by Perplexity AI, a San Francisco company. It answers questions by searching the web and citing its sources, which makes it both a research tool for marketers and one of the main AI search platforms that brands track for visibility and citations.

For search marketing, Perplexity is used to research topics and competitors, gather sourced statistics for content, and see which sites and pages it cites for queries in a given market. Pro Search runs more thorough multi-step searches, and Research produces longer reports. Projects group searches and files around a client or topic, and file uploads allow documents and data exports to be queried alongside web results. Pro subscribers can choose between models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Perplexity has a free tier with a small daily allowance of Pro searches, a Pro plan with much higher limits and around ten times as many citations per answer, and a Max plan for heavy use. Enterprise plans add team administration and connectors.