Perplexity explained: A 2025 deep dive into the AI answer engine

You’ve probably heard of Perplexity. It’s one of those AI tools that keeps popping up, but it can be a bit… well, perplexing. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, you might try out Perplexity and think, "Wait, isn’t this just doing the same thing?"

You’re not the only one. Perplexity has found its groove as a powerful alternative to traditional search, but it’s not always clear what it does or where it fits in the crowded world of AI. It promises to give you direct answers and cut through the clutter of SEO-driven blog posts, but can it really do more than just find stuff online?

This guide will break it all down for you. We’ll look at what Perplexity is, what it can do, how much it costs, and, most importantly, the major limitations and controversies that make it a shaky choice for business use, especially for customer support teams.

What is Perplexity?

So, what exactly is Perplexity? It’s not quite a chatbot like ChatGPT, and it’s not a search engine like Google. It calls itself an "answer engine," which is a pretty good description. Think of it as a hybrid: it takes a massive search index, mixes it with the smarts of a large language model (LLM), and gives you a straight, summarized answer with sources included.

Instead of just showing you a list of links and making you do the legwork, Perplexity does the reading for you and pulls together a summary. The main idea is to save you the time you’d spend clicking around different websites, trying to piece everything together yourself.

A big part of its appeal is that it connects to some of the most powerful LLMs out there, including models from OpenAI and Anthropic. This lets you tap into the different strengths of various AIs all from one place. At its heart, Perplexity is designed for individuals, students, researchers, and anyone who just needs quick, sourced answers from the web. It wasn’t built for the kind of integrated, complex work that businesses depend on.

A tour of Perplexity’s key features

While its main job is straightforward, Perplexity has a few features that really shape the user experience and make it stand out from other AI tools.

Perplexity’s conversational search experience with cited sources

Perplexity’s "answer-first" style is its trademark. When you ask something, you don’t just get links. You get a clean, well-written paragraph that answers your question directly, followed by a list of the sources it used. It’s a huge time-saver and makes it easy to check where the information came from.

A screenshot of the Perplexity interface showing how it provides answers with cited sources, which is a key feature of the AI answer engine.

The whole thing feels conversational, too. You can ask follow-up questions in "Threads," and the AI remembers the context, letting you go deeper into a topic without having to start from scratch. It’s less like searching and more like talking to a very on-the-ball research assistant.

Perplexity’s access to multiple cutting-edge AI models

One of the biggest draws for power users is that Perplexity acts as a sort of AI hub. With a Pro subscription, you’re not stuck with just one model. You can switch between different LLMs like GPT-4o and Claude 3 Opus to handle your search.

That’s a pretty big deal because different models are good at different things.

Perplexity gives you the freedom to pick the best tool for whatever you’re working on without needing a bunch of different subscriptions.

Perplexity’s cross-platform availability for on-the-go answers

You can use Perplexity just about anywhere. It’s on the web, has its own iOS and Android apps, and even has a Chrome extension called the "AI Companion." The extension is especially useful, letting you summarize the web page you’re on or ask questions about its content right from your browser.

Here’s a quick look at what you get with the Free plan versus the Pro plan.

Feature	Perplexity Free	Perplexity Pro ($20/mo)
Copilot Searches	5 every 4 hours	300+ per day
AI Model Access	Standard models	GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet & more
File Uploads	3 per day	Unlimited (images, PDFs, text)
API Credits	No	$10 per month
Pro Support	Standard	Priority support

Perplexity pricing explained

Perplexity keeps its pricing pretty simple, with two main options depending on how much you use it.

• Free Plan: This plan is solid for casual use. It gives you access to Perplexity’s standard AI models and a limited number of "Copilot" searches (five every four hours), which are more guided and in-depth.

• Pro Plan: For anyone who uses it a lot, the Pro plan is $20 per month or $200 per year. This gets you over 300 Copilot searches a day, access to top-tier models like GPT-4o and Claude 3 Opus, unlimited file uploads for analysis, and a $10 monthly API credit.

Major concerns and limitations of Perplexity for business use

While Perplexity is a handy tool for personal research, there are some serious issues that make it a risky and unsuitable choice for business functions like customer support.

The data crawling and ethics controversy

This is a big one. In a pretty detailed report, Cloudflare found that Perplexity uses "stealth crawlers" to ignore website rules and scrape content from sites that have explicitly said "no bots allowed." Basically, it takes information from places it’s been told not to.

For any business, that’s a huge red flag. Working with a tool that doesn’t respect data boundaries brings up serious questions about trust, security, and potential legal headaches. You have to be confident that your AI tools are playing by the rules.

This is where a business-focused tool like eesel AI takes a completely different path. It’s built on a permission-first model. It only learns from the knowledge you explicitly connect it to, whether that’s your private Confluence site, internal Google Docs, or your helpdesk history. Your data stays private, secure, and is only ever used to help your team and customers.

Lack of integration with business workflows

Here’s another roadblock for businesses: Perplexity is a bit of a lone wolf. It can find answers, but it can’t actually do anything with them. It doesn’t connect to your business systems or take action within the tools you already use.

For instance, Perplexity can’t:

• Tag or escalate a ticket in Zendesk.

• Look up a customer’s order status in Shopify.

• Route an urgent question to the right person in Slack.

A workflow diagram showing the inefficient manual steps required when using a non-integrated tool like Perplexity for support, compared to an automated AI solution.

A purpose-built platform is designed to handle exactly these kinds of tasks. eesel AI’s AI Agent has a fully customizable workflow engine. It doesn’t just find information; it performs "AI Actions" like sorting tickets, updating fields, and even calling external APIs. It fits right into your support setup, automating tasks without making you overhaul your current systems.

Limited to public knowledge and lacks deep context

Perplexity gets almost all of its information from the public internet. That means it has zero access to your company’s most important asset: its internal knowledge. It can’t read your past support tickets, your internal troubleshooting guides, or your private product specs.

Because of this, the answers it gives will always be generic. It can’t solve the specific, context-heavy problems your customers are actually running into. An AI that can’t access your internal know-how is just a slightly slicker version of Google, and that’s not going to cut it for providing real support.

This is exactly the problem eesel AI was built to solve. It connects all of your company’s scattered knowledge, instantly training on your past support conversations to learn your brand voice, common problems, and what solutions have worked before. This allows it to give highly relevant, personalized support that actually fixes things.

Choosing the right AI for the right job

Look, Perplexity is a really neat tool for what it does. It offers a cool glimpse into what the future of search could look like and is a great tool for personal research, learning, and general curiosity. If you need to get up to speed on a new subject fast, it’s one of the best options around.

But its questionable data-scraping methods, total lack of business integrations, and reliance on public data make it a risky and limited choice for any professional use.

When it comes to essential business functions like customer service, IT support, or internal knowledge management, you need something built for the job. You need a tool that’s secure, respects your data, connects with your existing tools, and learns from your company’s unique context. For all its strengths, Perplexity just doesn’t tick those boxes.

Build a smarter, safer AI for your support team

So, if you’ve read this far and are thinking, "Okay, I need something that’s actually built for my team," here’s what to look for. You want an AI solution that works with your helpdesk, learns from your private knowledge, and can be up and running in minutes, not months.

Unlike other platforms that make you sit through long sales calls and complicated setups, eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can connect your knowledge sources, set up your AI agent, and even test its performance on thousands of your past tickets to see the ROI before you even go live.

Start your free trial today and see how a business-ready AI can transform your support.