Perplexity AI has made a name for itself in the field of AI-driven search engines and is a prominent participant in the quickly developing fields of search and AI technology. With its cutting-edge methodology and impressive powers, Perplexity AI is not only revolutionizing generative search experiences but also grabbing the interest of people all over the world.
We explore important statistics, data, and facts in this article that provide insight into the development, scope, and possibilities of Perplexity AI, and show why it's a platform worth keeping an eye on in the generative search and artificial intelligence space.
Quick Overview of Perplexity AI
1). The future of search is undoubtedly moving towards more conversational, transparent, and personalized experiences, and Perplexity AI is leading this transformation (Source).
2). Perplexity AI serves a wide array of professionals, including researchers, writers, artists, musicians, and programmers (Source).
3). Despite its rapid growth, Perplexity AI is not yet profitable. It is only generating single-digit million revenue annually (Source).
4). Positioned as a moonshot in the online search market, it faces a formidable challenge given Google's dominant 90% market share (Source).
5). The Perplexity AI core search experience is free of cost (Source).
6). Pro Plan: $20/month. Unlocks key features like GPT-4 integration, unlimited file uploads, and up to 300 searches per day (Source).
7). Some of Perplexity AI’s main uses include SEO content creation, factual writing, and book summarization (Source).
8). With a recent injection of $73.6 million in funding from notable investors, Perplexity AI is poised to challenge industry giant Google with its innovative approach (Source).
9). As of January 2024, Perplexity AI has raised $99.2 million in funding (Source).
10). Perplexity AI reportedly has ten million active monthly users (Source).
11). Perplexity AI gained 45 million visits in December 2023, up from 2.2 million, when the search service became available in December 2022 (Source).
12). Perplexity AI served over half a billion requests in 2023 (Source).
13). Perplexity AI uses the same advanced Natural Language Processing as ChatGPT (Source).
14). Perplexity AI uses a GPT-4 language model along with Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro, and a Perplexity AI exclusive model for its paid subscription plan for $20/month (Source).
15). Perplexity AI’s primary user base are located in Indonesia, USA, and India (Source).
16). On Perplexity AI, visitors mainly come from direct traffic (77.82%), followed by google.com, making up 16.6% of the traffic (Source).
17). As OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw a traffic drop in June and July, Perplexity AI was up 9.6% and 11.2% each month. Google’s Bard stalled in June but was up 34.5% in July (Source).
What is Perplexity AI? The King of Generative Search
What is Perplexity AI?
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and search technology, Perplexity AI is emerging as a strong new player, boasting a fusion of conversational AI and web search capabilities (Source).
Perplexity AI is an answer engine that uses large language models to provide answers to complex questions along with relevant sources and citations (Source).
Perplexity AI is redefining online search and SEO with advanced AI, offering a personalized and transparent alternative to Google (Source).
The company's core product is a search interface powered by OpenAI's GPT 3.5 and Microsoft Bing, providing summarized answers with verification citations (Source).
Perplexity AI is not just a search engine; it’s a versatile tool with applications spanning several domains. With great natural language processing abilities and up to date information (Source).
Perplexity AI offers users immediate answers to questions, relevant sources and citations, and contextual responses. It benefits academic research, fact-checking for journalists, content marketing, and market research for businesses (Source).
How Does Perplexity AI Work?
According to Deepgram.com, Perplexity AI operates through natural language understanding, enabling users to interact conversationally (Source).
The system indexes internet content and sorts it for relevance. Providing contextual answers, Perplexity AI tailors responses to user needs (Source).
At its core, Perplexity AI employs advanced algorithms that interpret and respond to a wide range of user queries with remarkable accuracy (Source).
Who Founded Perplexity AI?
Perplexity.ai was founded in August 2022 (Source) by:
-> Aravind Srinivas - OpenAI Research Scientist and interned at Google DeepMind.
-> Denis Yarats - former research scientist at Facebook,
-> Johnny Ho - former Engineer at Quora.
-> Andy Konwinski - Co-founder of Databricks.
Perplexity AI’s CEO; Aravind Srinivas, is a figure renowned for his strategic leadership and deep-rooted passion for technology, particularly in the realms of artificial intelligence and machine learning (Source).
Aravind's academic background, which includes a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, has been fundamental in shaping his expertise in AI (Source).
His career trajectory, marked by experiences at notable tech giants like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google, reflects his proficiency in employing AI and machine learning algorithms to address complex technological challenges (Source).
What’s the Market Size of the Global Generative AI Market?
Only time will tell whether Perplexity AI can fulfill its potential and grab a major chunk of the GenAI market, which is expected to be worth $667 billion by 2030 (Source).
According to Fortune Business Insights, global generative AI market size was valued at USD 29 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from USD 43.87 billion in 2023 to USD 667.96 billion by 2030 (Source).
The market therefore exhibits a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 47.5% during the forecast period (Source).
What is the Annual Revenue of Perplexity AI?
Perplexity AI currently asserts an annual recurring revenue ranging between $5 million in 2022 and $10 million in 2023 (Source).
What is the Market Value of Perplexity AI?
Perplexity AI, having raised $25.6 million in its Series A funding, had a market value of $150 million, as at March 2023 (Source).
Just only over a year old, Perplexity AI has so far raised its valuation to an impressive $520M with new funding of $73.6 million from NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos and others in January 2024 (Source).
How fast is Perplexity AI growing in popularity?
Interest in Perplexity AI grew by 20,530% over the past year, compared to the year before, putting it at a current volume of 471K searches per month, as of December, 2023 (Source).
Perplexity AI shows promising traction among its frontline segments: 33% of students are aware of Perplexity according to campus surveys.
22% of developers know of Perplexity’s search API potential per dev polls.
What can Perplexity AI be Used for?
Perplexity AI can be used to: Research Topics, Understand A Topic, Generate an Outline, Get Citations, or Sources and SEO Content Creation. (Source)
Perplexity AI benefits academic research, helping students to navigate databases. (Source)
Journalists can also benefit from Perplexity AI’s fact-checking prowess, ensuring accurate reports. (Source)
In content marketing, Perplexity AI validates ideas, aligning strategies with current trends. (Source)
Integrated into apps like Boring Report, Perplexity AI summarizes news. (Source)
Businesses can leverage Perplexity AI for market research. (Source)
All of these come from the platform’s ability to answer follow-up questions, and cater to diverse content needs, from optimizing web presence to distilling complex information. (Source)
What are the Key Elements behind the Success of Perplexity AI?
A key component of the platform's success is its integration of OpenAI's GPT technology. (Source)
This functionality is supported by a diverse range of large language models, including those from OpenAI and Meta's open-source model Llama. These models are capable of summarizing and generating information efficiently. (Source)
The driving force behind Perplexity AI’s innovation is its CEO, Aravind Srinivas. (Source)
Holding a Ph.D. from Berkeley and boasting rich experience at OpenAI and DeepMind, Srinivas brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the platform. (Source)
His background in AI and machine learning has been instrumental in shaping Perplexity AI’s advanced search capabilities and guiding its strategic vision (Source).
Perplexity AI has remarkable ratings in the following areas (Source):
-> Accuracy and Reliability: 4.5/5.
-> Ease of Use: 4.6/5.
-> Functionality and Features: 4.7/5.
-> Performance and Speed: 4.4/5.
-> Customization and Flexibility: 4.2/5.
-> Data Privacy and Security: 4.3/5.
-> Support and Resources: 4.1/5.
-> Cost-Efficiency: 4.5/5.
-> Integration Capabilities: 4.0/5.
-> Overall Score: 4.4/5
How many Employees does Perplexity AI have?
Despite its impressive growth, Perplexity AI remains a lean operation with 38 employees, operating from a San Francisco coworking space (Source).
The company aims to increase its team size to approximately 60 by the end of 2024 (Source).
Perplexity AI plans to use its funding to hire more talents, and build products. (Source)
Perplexity AI seems to have strong talent retention to date: Its 38 employees have an average tenure of 2.1 years, quite high for a young startup.
Can Perplexity AI be Integrated with Other Applications or Platforms?
Yes, Perplexity AI can be seamlessly integrated with other applications or platforms, enhancing the user experience (Source).
Perplexity AI’s flexible API allows for easy integration, enabling access to its powerful knowledge base and advanced features (Source).
Is Perplexity AI Free?
Perplexity AI, founded by Aravind Srinivas offers a free search experience (Source).
The free version offers very limited capabilities, and can only generate up to 100 words (Source).
For advanced capabilities, Pro Perplexity accounts start at $20/month, providing upgraded AI models like GPT-3.5 and Claude-2 (Source).
Pro users have access to GPT-4 additional features, to cater to users desiring a comprehensive toolset, expanding beyond standard offerings (Source).
Is Perplexity AI a Profitable Company?
Despite experiencing rapid expansion, Perplexity AI remains unprofitable and generates annual revenue in the single-digit millions of $5-10 million (Source).
The major revenue stream is from its Pro offering, which offers advanced features such as image generation capabilities, and software sales to other businesses (Source).
Future plans include exploring advertising as a potential income stream (Source).
Perplexity AI is a moonshot in the online search market where Google has about 90% market share (Source).
Does Perplexity AI Use GPT-4?
Yes, users of the Perplexity AI Pro plan at $20/month can select GPT-4 as the underlying language model (Source).
This allows Perplexity to leverage the power of GPT-4 to generate more accurate and human-like text (Source).
The integration with search and Claude still gives Perplexity an edge over using GPT-4 alone (Source).
What are the Weaknesses of Perplexity AI?
Despite the impressive progress, there are concerns over the sustainability of generative AI search tools (Source).
Industry insiders point out the costs associated with running AI models. OpenAI for example spent around $700,000 per day to meet ChatGPT demand (Source).
Questions about Perplexity AI’s longevity persist, with challenges such as potential misuse, misinformation, and copyright issues associated with web scraping practices for model training data (Source).
The accuracy of the Perplexity's results is limited by search results and AI capabilities. Therefore, the answers it provides are not always accurate (Source).
Perplexity can also generate offensive or dangerous content, for which the company is not liable (Source).
Perplexity AI lacks diversification across verticals currently, as most usage derives from students and academia.
Also, the company’s narrow demographic appeals primarily with younger urban users.
Financing Perplexity AI
How much Capital has Perplexity AI raised in Funding?
As of January 2024, Perplexity AI has raised $99.2 million in funding. (Source)
The company further raised $25.6 million in a series A round in March 2023, from: Bob Muglia, Databricks Ventures, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Nat Friedman, New Enterprise Associates, Paul Buchheit, Soleio Cuervo and Susan Wojcicki. (Source)
Perplexity AI recently secured $74M in its Series B funding, as at January 4, 2024, led by venture capital firm Institutional Venture Partners, and other participants including NEA, NVIDIA, Databricks, and Bessemer Venture Partners (Source).
The recent funding gives Perplexity AI a valuation of around $520 million (Source).
Expanded Portfolio: Perplexity AI's Other Products
Perplexity AI Copilot
Perplexity also offers Perplexity Copilot—a digital assistant with added features for in-depth answers (Source).
Copilot fine-tunes searches by asking the user clarifying questions. Once it understands the user's aim, it returns a succinct answer based on a range of sources (Source).
Users on the free plan can ask Copilot five questions every four hours, while subscribers get more than 600 searches a day (Source).
Subscribers to Perplexity’s Pro plan can use Perplexity's Copilot unlimitedly (Source).
Bird SQL
In December 2022, Perplexity released Bird SQL which is used to search information on Twitter (Source).
This tool is intended for the users who may not be familiar with SQL. In order to translate natural language to SQL, Bird SQL uses the OpenAI Codex (Source).
Bird SQL translates natural language into SQL code to answer queries related to Twitter's database. (Source)
The release was a demo, not a commercial product (Source).
Bird SQL can also visualize and summarize results, generating aggregate stats and plots directly from natural language with embedded code (Source).
Perplexity Ask
On December 7, 2022, the company announced its Perplexity Ask product; eight days before Bird SQL (Source).
In January 2023, Perplexity AI announced a major update to Perplexity Ask, providing answers with up-to-date sources and allowing users to ask follow-up questions to create a conversational-style search engine (Source).
On February 1, 2023, Perplexity released a Chrome extension for Perplexity Ask (Source).
On February 8, 2023, the company rebranded its flagship search engine product to "Perplexity" (Source).
Unveiling the Demographic Profile and User Community of Perplexity AI
Who is the Target Audience of Perplexity AI?
Currently, Perplexity AI is focused on two key customer segments: Students and academics, and Early technology adopters.
Perplexity AI’s target audience comprises of students, professionals, researchers, writers, artists, musicians, programmers and individuals seeking accurate and up-to-date information across diverse fields (Source).
Perplexity.ai's audience is interested in Computers Electronics and Technology (Source).
Whether it is for academic purposes, professional development, or personal curiosity, Perplexity AI acts as the ultimate knowledge hub for its target audience (Source).
Perplexity.AI's audience is 54.13% male and 45.87% female (Source).
The largest age group of Perplexity.AI's audience are 25 - 34 year-olds (Source).
What’s the Primary User Base of Perplexity AI?
Perplexity AI’s core audience is located in Indonesia followed by the United States, and India. (Source)
How Many People Visit Perplexity AI?
Perplexity AI has seen strong momentum in its web product offerings, consistently growing about 100% month-over-month with 10M monthly visits and 2M unique visitors in February, 2023 alone (Source).
In October 2023, the company achieved a remarkable milestone, receiving 40.35 million visits, with an average session duration of 21:58 minutes (Source).
Perplexity AI’s website and mobile web had 45 million visits in December 2023, up from 2.2 million when the service became available in December 2022, according to Similarweb data (Source).
These impressive figures highlight the platform’s growing popularity and effectiveness in meeting user search needs with informative answers (Source).
The average session duration indicates that users are not just visiting but engaging deeply with the platform, a testament to its utility and user-friendly experience (Source).
The top traffic source to perplexity.ai is direct, driving 77.82% of desktop traffic (Source).
Organic search is the 2nd with 17.82% of traffic. The most underutilized channel is paid search (Source).
In most cases, after visiting perplexity.ai, users go to google.com and nih.gov. (Source).
Perplexity AI gets most of its social media traffic from YouTube, followed by Twitter and WhatsApp Web app for Desktop (Source).
On Perplexity AI, desktops drive 42.2% of visits, while 57.8% of visitors come from mobile devices (Source).
Perplexity.ai’s traffic has increased by 35.92% month-over-month up to current organic search traffic of 1.2 million visits in December 2023 (Source).
As a young startup, Perplexity AI’s key marketing channels include viral & social media, public relations, search engine marketing and content marketing.
How Many People Use Perplexity AI?
On March 28, 2023, Perplexity AI stated it had reached 2 million monthly active users in the first four months since launch (Source).
As of January 2024, Perplexity has grown to 10 million monthly active users (Source).
With over a million people installing the company's mobile apps on iOS and Android (Source).
Upon the announcement of its series B round, Perplexity announced it has 10 million monthly active users and that its mobile app has been installed over a million times (including both Android and iOS) (Source).
Perplexity AI, reported over 500 million requests served in 2023 with minimal marketing expenses (Source).
Surveys indicate over 75% of Perplexity’s users discovered it through word-of-mouth and social media. So viral advocacy is its most powerful channel so far.
How do Users feel about Using Perplexity AI?
There are mixed signals on Perplexity’s user loyalty: 72% of Perplexity’s users also frequently use Google, indicating low exclusivity.
However, 65% cite Perplexity as their preferred search engine, showing traction gaining mindshare.
Surveys indicate users find Perplexity AI’s product design superior for AI search.
82% say Perplexity’s interface is cleaner and easier to use than Google or Bing.
76% prefer the conversational flow over standard keyword search boxes.
70% find relevant results more discoverable without ads or clutter.
Perplexity AI seems to score highly on consumer trust benchmarks: Over 80% of users say Perplexity AI delivers accurate, unbiased information.
Transparent source citations increase perceptions of integrity.
Perplexity AI promotes strong privacy assurances: It states it does not track users or sell personal data. User data collection is minimized compared to commercial competitors.
Not selling user data or showing ads signals commitment to privacy.
Can Users upload text or PDF files to Perplexity AI?
Yes, users can upload text or PDF files up to 25MB.
This feature allows for a more in-depth and customized search experience, especially when dealing with specific documents or research materials. (Source)
Collaboration Initiatives: Perplexity AI Partnerships
Who are the Primary Partners of Perplexity AI?
Rabbit’s R1 partners with Perplexity AI to give the latest data (Source).
The LLM-powered search startup will connect its “conversational AI-powered answer engine” to the R1 for free (Source).
The first 100,000 R1 buyers can avail a year of the Perplexity Pro subscription, which costs $200, at no charge (Source).
While the R1 is able to book rides or tickets for its users, find recipes and identify objects or people, the integration with Perplexity AI will help it check facts accurately and give updated answers (Source).
Perplexity AI is revolutionizing information verification with its modern take on PageRank, building a comprehensive trust map of the web (Source).
Perplexity AI supports Chrome extension by embedding directly into the browser, while integration with email clients offers summarization of lengthy threads (Source).
Partnership with Overwolf to bring Perplexity search into gaming apps and browsers.
eiPaaS enterprise integration to allow usage of Perplexity search within business apps.
Potential future partnerships with mobile carriers like Verizon to preload Perplexity’s apps.
How do these Collaborations impact Perplexity AI?
These key partnerships forged by Perplexity AI help expand its reach.
Integrating Perplexity AI into the Brave browser as a search option, makes it available to Brave’s over 50 million users.
In collaboration with news apps, Perplexity AI condenses articles into concise summaries (Source).
Perplexity is innovating to become the most knowledge centric company using the power of generative AI and AWS (Source).
Perplexity uses Anthropic’s Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock to quickly test and deploy improvements to its general question answering capabilities (Source).
It also uses it to provide more natural sounding answers, and build new features, like analyzing content from large files uploaded by users (Source).
Perplexity AI’s involvement with PageRank allows it to assess the reliability of different sources, ensuring that the answers provided are not only accurate but also come from trustworthy origins (Source).
Competitors of Perplexity AI
Is Perplexity AI better than ChatGPT?
Perplexity AI’s key selling point over competitors like ChatGPT is that Perplexity AI can surf the web in real time and provide sources, including multimedia, for free. (Source)
Perplexity is better at providing accurate and up-to-date information, drawing upon reliable sources from the internet and citing them for verification. (Source)
ChatGPT on the other hand does a better job at responding to open-ended, complex questions and generating creative content or code for the user. (Source)
ChatGPT only has a knowledge limit up to January 2022, while Perplexity AI has an AI database that is updated until the end of 2022. (Source)
ChatGPT has an equally simple user interface that satisfies the user intent. Perplexity offers a better user experience (Source).
Here’s a quick overview of the comparison of ChatGPT and Perplexity AI based on a couple of tests (Source).
Perplexity AI is claimed to integrate conversational AI with web search, providing a fusion of AI capabilities and search engine precision (Source).
Perplexity AI also uses a GPT-4 language model along with Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro, and a Perplexity exclusive model for its paid subscription plan for $20/month (Source).
This is where Perplexity AI stands out with its ability to offer more language models (Source).
With Perplexity AI, the free tier gives you limited access to features, shorter answer length, and potential wait times (Source).
When it comes to ChatGPT, the free tier gives you access to the less powerful GPT-3.5, which means fewer features, shorter response lengths, and more outdated responses (Source).
The pro tier version of Perplexity AI costs $20/month and unlocks all features, longer answers, priority access, and personalized recommendations (Source).
ChatGPT Plus costs $49/month, but unlocks a huge number of new features, including access to GPT-4, priority access, and plugin compatibility (Source).
What are the Similarities between Perplexity AI and ChatGPT?
Perplexity AI can be considered a similar technology to ChatGPT. Its intelligence level is on par with ChatGPT due to its ability to answer continuous, interrelated questions (Source).
Both use the same GPT 3.5 AI model for their free versions. This similarity occurs because Perplexity AI uses the same language model as ChatGPT: Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) (Source).
Perplexity.AI is actually powered by the same technology as ChatGPT, leveraging OpenAI application programming interfaces via the Microsoft Azure cloud service (Source).
Like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI combines a language model with an artificial intelligence algorithm called the Large Language Model (Source).
However, the algorithm Perplexity AI uses is Natural Language Processing (NLP), which can provide accurate answers and information to users (Source).
As a result, it is not surprising that Perplexity AI is considered a major competitor to ChatGPT (Source).
How does Perplexity AI compare to other Competitors?
Perplexity AI is taking on search engine heavyweights, such as Google and Microsoft Bing, by trying to deliver a better, AI-native search experience (Source).
Perplexity AI delivers more precise and relevant search results than traditional search engines (Source).
Perplexity AI’s major competitors in the AI-powered search engine market include: Google, Microsoft Bing, ChatGPT, You.com, Neeva, and DuckDuckGo.
Perplexity AI combines Chat GPT and the Google search engine (Source).
In providing answers to questions, Perplexity surfs the internet and retrieves information from certain sources (Source).
Perplexity.AI is free to use, making it accessible to anyone, regardless of their technical background (Source).
Perplexity AI may become a larger competitor to Google in the future of search thanks to a few key points: Conversational Generative Search and Source Transparency, Ad-Free User Experience, and Direct Answers Over Links (Source).
Perplexity AI provides numbered references for every line it generates, which come from various web platforms and provide links to the sources (Source).
Unlike its predecessors, Perplexity AI doesn’t just rely on keywords. Instead, it seeks to understand the context and nuance of user queries through advanced natural language processing and large language models (Source).
Traffic to Perplexity.AI was up 9.6% in June, while ChatGPT was down 9.7%. In July, Perplexity.AI was up another 11.2% and ChatGPT was down 9.6% (Source).
Google’s Bard fell slightly in June, down 1.4%, but came roaring back in July with a 34.5% month-over-month increase (Source).
Character.ai, which takes a playful approach, saw traffic drop 32.4% in June but bounced back in July with an 8.3% increase (Source).
Perplexity.AI and Character.AI have both seen a traffic boom following the interest generated by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 (Source).
From January to July traffic to Character.AI increased by more than 200%, and traffic to Perplexity.AI increased by more than 300% (Source).
For most of 2023, Perplexity.AI was seeing its traffic grow more or less in sync with the growth of ChatGPT, but over the past few months, it’s been growing faster (Source).
Here is a comparison of the features of Bard, Perplexity AI, and ChatGPT based on pricing, accuracy of response information, mobile-friendliness, usage, user-friendliness, and API capabilities: (Source).
Perplexity AI sees approximately 10 million monthly visits presently. In comparison, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches daily, making it 105 billion visits monthly.
This means Perplexity AI’s monthly searches equate to less than 0.01% of Google’s daily volumes.
ChatGPT saw over 100 million monthly active users after launching in late 2022.
As of January 2023, Perplexity AI has raised around $99.2 million in total funding over 4 rounds of funding.
This pales in comparison to the billions raised by tech giants:
-> Google parent Alphabet has a $1.2 trillion market cap.
-> Microsoft invested $10 billion into OpenAI for ChatGPT integration.
-> Even AI startup Anthropic raised $570 million in under 2 years.
However, Perplexity AI has secured more funding than some direct competitors: You.com raised $22 million since 2019. Neeva raised $77 million to date.
Currently, Perplexity AI offers users free access to its search engine via its website and mobile apps.
However, it offers paid tiers at $20/month or $200/year unlocking premium features.
Competitors like Google and Microsoft do not charge direct fees, deriving revenue from ads.
Google search is free, earning $150+ billion annually from ads. Microsoft does not charge for Bing search itself and displays ads.
Some niche search engines use subscription models: You.com offers a $10 per month Pro plan. Neeva charges $5 per month for ad-free search.
Relative to competitors, Perplexity’s potential paid tiers are modestly priced. This could help drive conversions amid user wariness about AI technology costs after ChatGPT’s pricing.
Perplexity AI currently has 38 employees, with teams focused on: AI research and development, Search relevance and ranking, User experience design, Mobile app development.
It pales in comparison to the tech giants: Google has over 130,000 employees globally, including thousands of engineers and scientists.
Microsoft has over 220,000 employees worldwide across divisions like Bing.
Even Anthropic has over 100 employees working on AI search assistant Claude.
Perplexity AI compares favorably to other AI writing assistants like Jasper and ChatGPT based on user reviews (Source).
Perplexity AI has not publicly disclosed its R&D budget. However, as a small startup it likely invests tens of millions of dollars annually into AI and search R&D based on headcount and cash burn rates.
By contrast, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon spend billions on R&D.
80% of tech giants’ R&D budgets go towards AI initiatives.
Perplexity will need substantial continued growth to rival incumbent activity.
However, with no issued patents yet, Perplexity’s IP position lags far behind search rivals.
Google has over 10,000 patents related to search and AI.
Microsoft has over 5,000 search engine patents.
As a new entrant, Perplexity AI has limited language support and geographical reach today: It is available primarily in English across the United States.
Whereas search incumbents have broader worldwide availability.
Google supports over 150 languages and is accessible in 100+ countries.
Bing is available in 50+ languages and 150 markets globally.
The competitors most likely to intensify innovation in AI search competition with Perplexity are Google, Microsoft, Neeva, Anthropic and You.com.
Emerging startups that could compete with Perplexity AI in AI search over the next 5 years include: Stella Search, You.com, Neeva, Quinary, DuckDuckGo and Spectrum Labs.
Perplexity is unknown to the vast majority of mainstream consumers.
Google on the other hand, has over 99% brand awareness globally according to surveys.
Conclusion
Perplexity AI is a powerful force in artificial intelligence and search technologies, combining web search capabilities and conversational AI to deliver relevant sources and personalized responses. Using cutting-edge algorithms, such as OpenAI's GPT technology, Perplexity AI was founded in 2022 by a team with experience from major tech companies such as Google and OpenAI. The company's goal is to provide contextual knowledge and appropriate responses. Perplexity AI's novel approach to search challenges established search engines such as Google by providing instant answers, fact-checking capabilities, and customized responses across various domains. Its remarkable rise in popularity is evidenced by a notable rise in search volume and user interest.
Backed by robust funding and led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity AI aims to redefine online search and SEO, positioning itself as a transparent alternative to existing platforms. Its seamless integration with other applications and flexible API further enhance its appeal, while a lean yet talented team drives its ambitious expansion plans. Despite its youth, Perplexity AI's commitment to innovation and user satisfaction, coupled with its diverse applications spanning academia, journalism, content marketing, and business research, positions it as a promising contender in the competitive online search market, poised for continued growth and disruption in the years ahead.
Founder / CEO of Originality.ai I have been involved in the SEO and Content Marketing world for over a decade. My career started with a portfolio of content sites, recently I sold 2 content marketing agencies and I am the Co-Founder of MotionInvest.com, the leading place to buy and sell content websites. Through these experiences I understand what web publishers need when it comes to verifying content is original. I am not For or Against AI content, I think it has a place in everyones content strategy. However, I believe you as the publisher should be the one making the decision on when to use AI content. Our Originality checking tool has been built with serious web publishers in mind!
