Perplexity Launches Search API with Hundreds of Billions of Webpages, Targets AI Ecosystem

Perplexity AI, a prominent AI search startup, officially launched its new Search API on September 25, 2025, providing developers with programmatic access to its extensive search infrastructure. The API is designed to offer direct, real-time search results in milliseconds, aiming to enhance the grounding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, stated via social media, > "This is an effort that began more than two years ago: to build our own search index. So much progress in a short period of time. We look forward to supporting the ecosystem with the best search API for AI."

The Perplexity Search API grants access to a proprietary index covering hundreds of billions of webpages, leveraging fine-grained retrieval that divides documents into smaller units for more precise results. It features real-time indexing, processing tens of thousands of updates per second, and utilizes an AI-powered content understanding module to deliver structured, pre-ranked snippets optimized for AI applications. This approach aims to reduce preprocessing and accelerate integration for developers.

This strategic launch positions Perplexity as a significant player in the evolving AI search landscape, directly challenging the dominance of established search incumbents. The company is providing a software development kit (SDK) and an open-source evaluation framework, search_evals, to facilitate adoption and allow developers to benchmark API performance. Perplexity officials claim the API leads competitors in quality, latency, and cost-effectiveness for AI workloads.

Founded in 2022, Perplexity has rapidly expanded, recently reaching a valuation of $20 billion after securing $200 million in new funding. The company aims to become an essential infrastructure layer for developers building search-driven products, despite facing recent accusations of copyright infringement from entities like Encyclopedia Britannica. The new API offers various pricing tiers, including a base Search API rate of $5 per 1,000 requests with no token fees.