Perplexity is an AI answer engine: it searches the live web, reads top sources, and writes a cited answer instead of a link list, with dedicated Focus modes for academic, Reddit, YouTube and news search.
Free: unlimited standard searches, all Focus modes, Spaces, no daily cap. Pro is $20/month (frontier models, file uploads, image/video generation, daily Deep Research). Max is $200/month (Perplexity Computer, a 19-model multi-agent orchestrator).
Designers doing research-heavy work (competitive audits, trend research, technical lookups) who want sourced, citable answers instead of manually cross-referencing search results.
Use Focus modes deliberately (Academic for research papers, YouTube for tutorial discovery), the free tier already includes all of them, so there's no reason to default to generic Web search for a specialized query.
AI-powered answer engine for accurate, real-time answers.
