Perplexity is a conversational AI answer engine built by Perplexity AI, a San Francisco company founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. The main search portal launched on December 7, 2022. The system combines large language models with real-time web retrieval: instead of returning a list of links, it generates a synthesized answer to the user's query and lists the citations behind it.
Perplexity offers a free public tier and a paid Perplexity Pro subscription with model choice (GPT-5.4 Thinking, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro and more), Internal Knowledge Search (searching uploaded files alongside the web), Deep Research (long structured reports), Model Council (comparing outputs across multiple models) and Pages (cited reports). The company also develops its own models: Sonar (Llama-based, tuned for search) and R1 1776 (an open-source variant of DeepSeek R1).
Perplexity is available through the web, iOS and Android apps, a Chrome extension and a Search API for developers. In July 2025 the company released its own Chromium-based browser Comet, and earlier in 2025 it shipped the Perplexity Assistant for Android. In May 2025 the company reported 780 million queries per month and more than 20% month-over-month growth. By early 2026 Perplexity was valued at roughly $21 billion; in February 2026 it discontinued its AI-integrated advertising strategy and shifted to a subscription-first model.
