bulaev.ai

Perplexity

Freemium

Research · Personal & corporate AI OS

Search-grounded answers with citations, plus Search, Agent, Router and Embeddings APIs for your own research agents.

Open perplexity.ai

What it is

Perplexity is an answer engine: ask a question, get a written answer with numbered citations to live web sources, with follow-ups that keep the thread. It has free and paid consumer tiers, a browser (Comet), and spaces for organizing research. For builders the API platform matters more. Per its docs it offers a Search API (raw ranked web results with filters and real-time data), an Agent API (web-grounded answers with citations in one call, with access to third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI), a Router API (one OpenAI-compatible endpoint for open-weight models it hosts) and an Embeddings API for RAG.

The main site serves a bot challenge to automated browsers, so the screenshot on this card is of the API documentation at docs.perplexity.ai rather than the home page.

Where it fits in the AI OS

Personal & corporate AI OS, the research layer, and a GTM input: "what is being said about X this week, with sources" is the first step of most content and positioning work. On the corporate side, the Search and Agent APIs are how you give your own agents a citation-backed web view without building a crawler.

Insider notes

members

How Serge's stack uses it

Web research tooling in the project's private research repositories is not documented publicly.

[SERGE: fill in]

Setup in 5 minutes

  1. Sign up on the web; ask one question you would normally Google and compare the sources it picked.
  2. Create a Space for one topic you research weekly; add three source documents.
  3. In the API console, create a key.
  4. curl https://api.perplexity.ai/chat/completions with a sonar model (see the docs for the current model list) and a question; read the citations array.
  5. Wire the Search API into a weekly Worker cron that lists new mentions of your product and posts them to a channel.

Alternatives

  • ChatGPT search / Claude web search — grounded answers inside the assistant you already use.
  • Exa / Tavily — search APIs built for agents.
  • Google Programmable Search + your own summarizer — cheap, more assembly.
  • Kagi — a paid, private search engine with its own assistant.