What Is Perplexity AI and How It Differs From Google Search

Perplexity is an AI search engine. Instead of a page of links, it searches the web for you, reads the results and writes an answer, with numbered citations pointing to the pages it used. Google is moving the same way with AI Overviews and AI Mode, but the two still work differently.

How Perplexity works

1. You ask a question in plain language.
2. Perplexity runs web searches, picks pages and has a language model write an answer from them.
3. Each claim in the answer links to a numbered source, and you can ask follow-up questions that keep the context.

There's a free version and a paid Pro plan with more advanced searches and a choice of AI models. Perplexity has also launched its own browser, Comet, built around the same assistant.

How it differs from Google Search

• Answer first vs links first. Classic Google ranks links and leaves the reading to you. Perplexity reads for you and gives you a summary.
• Conversation. Perplexity keeps the thread, so "what about for kids?" makes sense as a follow-up. A Google search starts fresh each time, unless you use AI Mode.
• Breadth. Google is far stronger for local businesses, maps, shopping, flights, sports scores and very fresh news, because it has its own data for them.
• Ads. Google's results pages carry many ads. Perplexity's answers mostly don't, though it has experimented with sponsored follow-up questions.

Perplexity vs Google AI Mode

AI Mode is Google's own conversational search: you ask, it writes an answer with links and lets you follow up, much like Perplexity. The differences are mostly in the sources and the extras. AI Mode draws on Google's index and its shopping, maps and other data. Perplexity shows its sources more prominently and lets paid users pick the model that writes the answer. Both can be wrong in the same ways, by misreading a source, blending two sources, or stating something no source says.

When to use which

• Perplexity: research questions where you want an overview with sources, such as comparing options, explaining a topic or summarizing recent coverage.
• Google: finding a specific site, local results, shopping, and anything where you want to choose the source yourself.
• Either: open the cited sources before you rely on an answer, especially for health, money or legal questions.

For site owners: tracking Perplexity traffic

Visits from Perplexity answers show up in analytics as referrals from perplexity.ai. In Google Analytics 4, look under Traffic acquisition with the session source set to perplexity.ai. Perplexity's crawler identifies itself as PerplexityBot, which you can allow or block in robots.txt. Blocking it keeps your pages out of its index, and with that out of its answers and citations.

If you prefer Google without the AI summaries, see how to search Google without AI answers.