Perplexity AI
Web-connected AI search and chat models for your applications
Perplexity API exposes the Sonar family of language models with built-in web search and SafeSearch filtering. It’s aimed at developers who want to add grounded, internet-connected Q&A and chat to their products while keeping API query data out of training. Hosted on AWS in North America with usage-based tiers and an OpenAI-compatible chat interface.
Ask about Perplexity AI
Get answers based on Perplexity AI's actual documentation
Try asking:
About
Perplexity API is a developer-focused platform that exposes Perplexity’s Sonar language models over HTTP, including models that can search Perplexity’s index and the public internet. It sits somewhere between a traditional LLM API and a search engine, designed for building web-connected Q&A, research assistants, and chat interfaces.
The target audience is developers and teams who want to embed Perplexity-style search and chat into their own applications rather than using the consumer UI. You get SDKs, OpenAI-compatible chat completions, and a Search API, along with usage tiers and billing controls in an online dashboard. Compute runs on AWS in North America, and getting started revolves around generating API keys, choosing a Sonar model, and calling the documented endpoints.
According to the documentation, Sonar models can browse the web by leveraging Perplexity’s search index and the public internet, and SafeSearch-style content filtering is enabled by default for API responses. The sonar-reasoning-pro model returns a dedicated reasoning section followed by strict JSON, but this also means typical response_format controls won’t hide the reasoning tokens—you’re expected to parse out the JSON yourself. The API also offers OpenAI-compatible chat completions, search and filtering tools, and guidance on best practices, rate limits, and usage tiers.
Privacy-wise, Perplexity states that API query data has zero-day retention and is not used for model training. They do collect account information and usage metadata (like request and token counts) for billing, which you can inspect via the dashboard. There is no fine-tuning support at this time, so if you need custom-trained models you’ll have to look elsewhere or layer your own retrieval and orchestration on top. This is not a full agent platform: while models can browse and reason, multi-step workflows, external tool integrations, and memory across sessions need to be implemented by your own application logic. Pricing details exist on a separate pricing page, but specific per-token or per-call rates are not disclosed in the FAQ itself.
Some tool use, but you're still driving
Perplexity Sonar is a powerful grounded LLM + search API, but it is primarily a stateless, request–response service rather than an autonomous agent. It excels at web-aware question answering and structured reasoning outputs that developers can use inside their own agents or workflows. Direct agentic capabilities—independent action, multi-step planning, persistent state, and rich safety controls around actions—are minimal within the product itself.
Overall agenticness level: Low (Level 1 – limited agentic behavior, mainly tool for building agents).
Score Breakdown
Categories
Ask about Perplexity AI
Try asking:
- Pricing not publicly available
https://agentic-directory.onrender.com/t/perplexity-ai