Perplexity has introduced the Search API, opening up access to the same infrastructure that underpins its public answer engine. With coverage of hundreds of billions of webpages and infrastructure tuned for AI-heavy workloads, the new API is aimed at developers who want real-time, reliable search results for building their own agents, applications, and retrieval-augmented pipelines.
For years, large-scale search has been dominated by providers with closed indices. Perplexity takes a different approach: rather than returning full documents, its API delivers fine-grained, pre-ranked snippets. This reduces the need for additional preprocessing and enables faster integration into AI-driven workflows.
The company stresses that accuracy and freshness are central. Its indexing system updates tens of thousands of documents per second, supported by an AI-powered content understanding module that parses messy web data in real time. This means results are not only broad in coverage but also timely—a key need for AI systems that risk hallucination or outdated answers when grounded on stale data.
On Reddit, some developers immediately questioned how the new release fits alongside Perplexity’s existing tools:
How is this different from the current API?
One Perplexity’s developer answered:
Unlike the current Sonar API, which returns synthesized answers, the new Search API gives raw, ranked web results—so you can use them directly, ground other models, or build your own agents on top!
Others highlighted the speed improvements. Abhilash Jaiswal, an AI expert at Atos, noted:
This speed is amazing, so kudos to the team who worked on it. Yes, after Bing’s retirement, there was a situation to find the alternatives quickly, so it got into a bit of instability. However, we found the sort of solution for our needs. To leverage this, we need to have it in the developer community, preferably as MCP.
To back up its claims, Perplexity is releasing search_evals, an open-source evaluation framework for testing different search APIs. In early results, the Search API is reported to outperform competitors on both single-step queries and multi-step agentic research workflows, scoring higher on both quality and latency. Perplexity also says that, thanks to infrastructure efficiencies, it can deliver these gains at lower cost.
Ease of use has also been emphasized. Alongside the API, Perplexity is shipping a developer console, documentation, and a Search SDK, which the company’s own engineers have used to prototype new features in under an hour. The API is available now via the Perplexity API Platform, which also hosts the Sonar API.
With real-time freshness, structured responses, and raw web access, the Perplexity Search API could become an essential building block for the next wave of AI agents and retrieval-heavy products.
