Perplexity is intensifying its competition with Google increasingly these days. The AI search startup, which recently made headlines in India for partnering with Bharti Airtel to extend free benefits to millions of subscribers, has now taken the next step to heat up the competition to Google. The new Perplexity Search API will provide developers with direct access to its massive, real-time web index.
The access to Perplexity’s Search API is aimed at evolving it into a foundational search infrastructure for the next generation of AI-powered products and autonomous agents, directly challenging Google’s longstanding dominance over web data.
The new API, which is available immediately with SDKs for Python and TypeScript, opens access to an index spanning hundreds of billions of web pages.
Perplexity Search API pricing
The Search API is priced affordably at $5 per 1,000 requests, with no additional token fees. This makes it a compelling alternative for developers, thereby making Perplexity more data-rich. Perplexity has already secured early enterprise customers, including major tech players like Zoom, Copy.ai, and Doximity.
Perplexity’s technical advantage lies in features specifically tailored for AI applications that require highly contextual and accurate data. The API employs sub-document precision, which identifies and ranks specific, relevant passages within web pages, rather than entire documents. This approach, combined with hybrid retrieval, allows the system to better understand complex, conversational queries from Large Language Models (LLMs).
The company highlighted this focus, stating that the API “surfaces the most relevant snippets from pages and sub-pages, ensuring that users get the most contextual answers possible, with source attribution built-in.”
Perplexity Search API comes at a worse time for Google
The launch is timed strategically as Google faces mounting antitrust pressure and a growing revolt from publishers, who claim Google’s own AI Overviews are causing significant traffic and revenue losses.
“Legacy search engines have kept developers beholden to their interests, namely favouring commercial intent traffic over helpful content,” said Perplexity’s spokesperson, Beejoli Shah.
The release of the Search API follows Perplexity’s aggressive expansion of its own Comet AI web browser and a premium AI Email Assistant.