AI startup Perplexity has announced the “Perplexity Search API,” which provides developers with the infrastructure that enables the company’s services and an index that covers “hundreds of billions” of webpages.
“When it comes to AI, context is king. It is insufficient to operate simply at the document level. Our indexing and retrieval infrastructure divides documents up into fine-grained units,” Perplexity said in a blog post.
According to Perplexity, this search API is designed for the unique demands of AI applications. “Unlike other API offerings that expose a restricted universe of information, our API provides rich structured responses that are ready for use in AI and traditional applications alike,” the company says.
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Perplexity said the new Search API reduces the need for preprocessing, speeds up integration, and delivers more useful downstream results.
The pricing tier for this ranges from the Sonar API at $1 per million input and output tokens to the Sonar Pro at $3 and $15 per million input and output tokens, respectively. It also provides specialized options like Sonar Reasoning, Sonar Reasoning Pro and Sonar Deep Research, which has different costs for reasoning, citations and search queries depending on the workload complexity. The company also states it has an edge over its competition in quality and latency.
Perplexity has also a Search SDK, which it says engineers have been able to use with AI coding tools to “develop impressive product prototypes in under an hour.” “We anticipate even more impressive feats from startups and solo developers, mature enterprises and everyone in between,” the company added.
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Perplexity recently reached a valuation of $20 billion after obtaining $200 million in fresh funding. The company, led by Indian American Aravind Srinivas, recently gained attention for making a $34.5 billion bid for Google’s Chrome.
The startup is also said to be developing integrations with educational platforms and enterprise knowledge systems, positioning itself as a leading search solution for both work and personal use. However, not all has been going well with it. Perplexity, like many other tech companies, has recently faced accusations of copyright violations. Copyright holders, including Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, allege that the startup improperly used their content in its “answer engine” for online searches.