Perplexity

An answer engine, not a chatbot — and not a model vendor

Perplexity's product is built around citations: every answer links to the web sources it drew from. That makes it useful for research where you need to verify claims. But understand what Perplexity is not — it does not own the frontier models it routes to, and the consumer product and the pplx-api are separate offerings with separate terms.

Practical implications

• Outputs can be used commercially, but the underlying cited sources have their own copyright — Perplexity surfaces them, it does not license them to you.
• The pplx-api is the path for programmatic, search-grounded answers; pricing and rate limits differ from the consumer app.
• For confidential queries, check the data-handling terms of the specific tier — Enterprise offers stronger controls than the consumer plan.

When to choose it

Use Perplexity when source attribution and freshness matter more than raw generation — competitive research, fact-finding, current events. For open-ended generation or building products, a direct model API (OpenAI, Anthropic) gives you more control.