AI startup Perplexity, on September 25, launched the ‘Perplexity Search API’, providing developers access to the infrastructure that enables Perplexity’s services and an index that covers “hundreds of billions” of webpages, the company announced.
“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.
“These sub-document units are individually surfaced and scored against the original query parameters, allowing our API to return documents with the most relevant snippets already ranked,” the company said in a statement, indicating that this would lead to less preprocessing while enabling faster integration.
Pricing tiers range from the lightweight 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 specialised options, such as Sonar Reasoning, Sonar Reasoning Pro and Sonar Deep Research, which add varying costs for reasoning, citations and search queries depending on the workload complexity.
The company also stated that the API leads the competition in terms of quality and latency, while providing top-tier performance at a lower cost.
Compared to other APIs from Exa and Brave, the company claims to deliver better performance and latency across industry-standard benchmarks such as SimpleQA and BrowseComp, among others.
Source: Perplexity
Besides, Perplexity also released a Search SDK, which the company says its engineers have been able to use along 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.
A few days ago, multiple reports indicated that Perplexity has “secured commitments” from investors for $200 million in new funding at a valuation of $20 billion. This marks an increase from its previous reported valuation of $18 billion, after a fundraising round in July.
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