Perplexity brings real-time Search API to AI: all you need to know

AI startup Perplexity announced last week that it is opening up access to its real-time web search through the new Perplexity Search API (application programming interface). This gives developers the ability to tap into a large, constantly updated index of web pages.

Sharing the news on X, the company said, “We've built a search index of billions of webpages to provide real-time, quality information from the web. Now developers have access to the full power of our index, providing the most accurate results in milliseconds".

In a blog post, Perplexity explained how its technology goes beyond simple document-level search. “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 into fine-grained units", the company wrote.


“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. This means less preprocessing, faster integration, and more valuable downstream results", the company added.

The company has kept the pricing flexible. The lightweight Sonar API starts at $1 per million tokens for input and output. The Sonar Pro options are priced at $3 and $15 per million tokens. The Search API, which works without any token-based charges, is available at $5 per 1,000 requests.

Perplexity also offers advanced tools for more complex tasks, including Sonar Reasoning, Sonar Reasoning Pro, and Sonar Deep Research, which come with additional costs based on usage, especially for reasoning and citation-heavy workloads.

For ease of use, the company has launched a new API platform which hosts both the developer console and documentation for Search and Sonar APIs. Its also introduced a Search SDK (software development kit), designed to simplify integration for both human developers and AI tools.

An SDK is a set of platform-specific building tools for developers. SDKs put everything developers need to develop and run software in one place.

“Our own engineers have been able to use the Search SDK alongside their favourite AI coding tools to develop impressive product prototypes in under an hour", the blog noted. “We anticipate even more impressive feats from startups and solo developers, mature enterprises, and everyone in between".

Earlier in the month, The Information reported that Perplexity has secured investor commitments for $200 million in fresh funding at a valuation of $20 billion. This follows its previous $100 million round in July, which valued the company at $18 billion.