Perplexity AI Features and Capabilities in 2026: The Complete Guide

By Elton Chan, Co-Founder September 11, 2026 9 min read

Perplexity AI Features and Capabilities. Perplexity AI Features and Capabilities in 2026: The Complete Guide, by Second Talent.

TL;DR: Perplexity in 2026 is an answer engine plus Computer, an agent that turns a request into finished work across more than 20 AI models. Pro costs $20 a month and Max $200, and the Comet browser is free on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. It answered 1.5 billion questions a month by May 2026.

In February 2026 Samsung gave Perplexity OS-level access on the Galaxy S26, the first company other than Google to get it, and Bixby now uses Perplexity for web search.

The same week Perplexity launched Computer, and it has since moved Deep Research, scheduled tasks and email inside it.

Key takeaways

1Deep Research now runs inside Computer, and its BrowseComp score more than doubled, from 40.7% to 83.8%.
2Perplexity is winding down its ads by the end of 2026, while ChatGPT’s ads passed a $1 billion run rate in August.
3The old Sonar chat API is supported only until September 27, 2026; developers move to the Agent API.
4A US appeals court vacated Amazon’s injunction against Comet’s shopping agent on August 4, 2026.

What Can Perplexity Do in 2026?

Feature	What it does	Who gets it
Search	Answers questions with inline citations, on a model you choose	Free (limited), Pro, Max
Computer	An agent that plans and finishes multi-step work across 20+ models	Pro and Enterprise; Max adds 10,000 credits a month
Deep Research	Long research reports, now run inside Computer	Pro and Max, through Computer
Model Council	Runs one query across several models and merges the answers	Max and Enterprise Max; a Computer skill on all paid plans
Personal Computer	Lets Computer work with the files and apps on your own machine	Mac for all users; Windows for Pro and Max
Comet	A Chromium browser with an assistant on every page	Free on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android
Agent API	Search, agents and embeddings for developers	Pay per use

Sources. Plans and features come from Perplexity’s pricing page, help center and changelog, read on September 12, 2026. Perplexity changes plan contents often, and its own pages disagree in places, noted below.

How Does Perplexity Search Work?

You ask in plain language, and Perplexity searches the web, reads the results and writes one answer with a numbered citation on each claim.

The free plan gets a small number of Pro Searches; paid plans unlock more, plus premium data sources such as PitchBook and Statista.

Perplexity's home screen asking What do you want to know, with Search and Computer modes side by side and a model picker.

The model is your choice. Perplexity’s model list, a snapshot dated September 4, 2026, gives Pro and Max subscribers eight models:

Sonar 2 (Perplexity)GPT-5.6 TerraGemini 3.7 FlashClaude Sonnet 5Kimi K3GLM 5.3Grok 4.6Nemotron 3 Ultra

Max adds GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.

Model Council, launched on February 5, 2026, sends one query to three models and has a fourth write a combined answer.

It is a Max and Enterprise Max feature on the web and iOS, but inside Computer it has run as a skill on every paid plan since July 28, using two to eight models. Perplexity says nearly half of Model Council users are executives.

Search also sells things now. Shopping launched free for US users in November 2025 with PayPal checkout, and in March 2026 Finance added brokerage linking through Plaid for users in the US and Canada.

What Is Perplexity Computer?

Computer is an agent that takes a goal rather than a question. It plans the steps, browses, writes files and code, and hands back finished work, picking a model for each step.

It launched on February 25, 2026 for Max subscribers with 19 models and reached Pro and Enterprise on March 12 with more than 20.

Perplexity says its own teams used Computer to do 3.25 years of work in four weeks, saving $1.6 million in labor costs, according to its March 11 post. That is the company’s own measure, not an outside audit.

Since launch it has absorbed most of the product:

Feb 25, 2026

Computer launches on Max

Mar 12, 2026

Pro and Enterprise get Computer

May 10, 2026

Personal Computer opens to every Mac user

May 28, 2026

Microsoft 365: Computer in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams

Jun 18, 2026

Deep Research moves inside Computer

Jul 13, 2026

Brain, a memory layer Perplexity says lifts answer correctness 25%

Aug 24, 2026

Email: send Computer a task at computer@perplexity.com

Source: Perplexity changelog and blog.

Computer runs on credits, at 100 credits to the dollar, per Perplexity’s credits guide. Max includes 10,000 a month plus a one-time 35,000 bonus; Pro has no monthly allowance, only a 4,000-credit bonus.

Max carries a default $200 monthly spending cap, which can be raised to $5,000. Scheduled Tasks in Computer have replaced the older Tasks feature, and Labs is now called Create files and apps.

Personal Computer extends the agent to your own desktop. It reached Mac for Max subscribers on April 16, every Mac user on May 10 and Windows for Pro and Max on August 4.

How Good Is Perplexity Deep Research?

Better since it moved into Computer, on Perplexity’s own numbers. Deep Research launched on February 14, 2025, finishing reports in two to four minutes and scoring 21.1% on Humanity’s Last Exam.

After the June 18 move, its product page compares the two versions:

Arrow chart of Perplexity Deep Research benchmark accuracy before and after it moved into Computer: Humanity's Last Exam 36.4% to 50.5%, BrowseComp 40.7% to 83.8%, DeepSearchQA 81.9% to 85%. Perplexity's own figures.

In February 2026 Perplexity also published DRACO, a benchmark of 100 research tasks. Its paper puts Deep Research, then running on Claude Opus 4.6, at 70.5%, ahead of Gemini at 59.0% and OpenAI o3 at 52.1%.

Perplexity built the benchmark it leads, so treat the ranking as a claim to test on your own questions.

What Is the Comet Browser?

Comet is Perplexity’s Chromium browser, with an assistant that can read, summarize and act on the page you are on. It launched on July 9, 2025 for Max subscribers only and went free for everyone on October 2, 2025.

Android followed on November 20, 2025 and iOS on March 18, 2026.

The Comet browser page, The browser that works for you, available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

Comet Plus, a $5 add-on that Pro and Max include, pays participating publishers the revenue from it minus a share for Perplexity’s compute costs, per the launch post.

Perplexity caps the agent’s workload by plan: limited on Free, included on Pro and ten times that on Max.

Its shopping agent is in court. Amazon sued in November 2025 and won a preliminary injunction in March 2026, but the Ninth Circuit vacated it on August 4 and sent the case back to the district court.

Our ChatGPT Atlas review covers the main rival AI browser.

How Much Does Perplexity Cost?

Plan	Price	Notes
Free	$0	A small number of Pro Searches
Education Pro	$10 a month	Pro, for verified students and educators
Pro	$20 a month	Computer, Comet Plus, 400+ app connectors
Max	$200 a month or $2,000 a year	10,000 Computer credits a month, Model Council, Brain
Enterprise Pro	$40 a seat a month or $400 a year	500 credits a month, admin and security
Enterprise Max	$325 a seat a month or $3,250 a year	15,000 credits a month, all models

The seat price and the included usage are different things. Monthly credits, converted to dollars, show how much agent work each plan covers before you buy more:

Grouped column chart of Perplexity plan price against monthly Computer credits in dollars: Pro $20 and $0, Enterprise Pro $40 and $5, Max $200 and $100, Enterprise Max $325 and $150.

Enterprise plans hold a SOC 2 Type II report, delete uploaded files after seven days and keep company data out of model training, per the enterprise help pages.

SCIM provisioning needs 50 seats on Enterprise Pro, or a single Enterprise Max seat. Perplexity says more than 50,000 organizations use it, including NVIDIA, Databricks, Stripe and Snowflake.

The Perplexity Pro page: the most accurate answers from all the top AI models, powered by Perplexity Computer, research, premium data and top models.

One inconsistency to check before buying: the pricing page’s FAQ lists Model Council under Pro, while its comparison table and help center reserve it for Max outside Computer.

What Can Developers Build With the Perplexity API?

Search and agents, billed per request or per token.

The Search API costs $5 per 1,000 requests, and the Agent API bills third-party models at their providers’ rates with no markup, plus small per-call fees for tools such as web search, at $0.0025 a call, per the API pricing docs.

Perplexity API Platform pricing docs showing the Search API at $5 per 1,000 requests, with tabs for the Agent, Sonar and Embeddings APIs.

API model	Input, per 1M tokens	Output, per 1M tokens	Requests, per 1,000
sonar	$1	$1	$5 to $12
sonar-pro	$3	$15	$6 to $14
sonar-reasoning-pro	$2	$8	$6 to $14
sonar-deep-research	$2	$8	$5 per 1,000 searches

Sonar is the legacy route. Perplexity’s docs say Sonar chat completions are now the Agent API and that Perplexity will support Sonar until September 27, 2026, so new builds should start on the Agent API.

Its pplx-embed-v1 embeddings cost $0.004 per million tokens for the small model, and a Router API is in private preview.

How Big Is Perplexity in 2026?

1.5B

questions answered a month, May 2026

$750M+

annualized revenue, August 2026

$20B

last confirmed valuation

$1.7B

total funding raised

Sources: CNBC Disruptor 50, Reuters, TechCrunch.

Query volume almost doubled in a year: Aravind Srinivas put it at 780 million in May 2025. Revenue grew faster.

Annualized revenue was under $100 million in March 2025 and passed $750 million by August 2026, Reuters reported, citing The Information:

Bar chart of Perplexity's reported annualized revenue: just under $100 million in March 2025, approaching $200 million in September 2025, less than $250 million in January 2026, more than $450 million in March 2026, $500 million in April 2026 and more than $750 million in August 2026.

The same report said Nvidia was in talks to invest at a valuation above $30 billion; the last confirmed round, in September 2025, set $20 billion. Srinivas has said Perplexity is planning for an IPO in 2028.

Its share of AI traffic is shrinking even as revenue climbs. Statcounter measures which chatbots send visitors to websites, and Perplexity’s share fell from 7.87% in June to 4.34% in August 2026:

Treemap of AI chatbot referral share in August 2026 from Statcounter: ChatGPT 79.4%, Gemini 10.93%, others 5.33%, Perplexity 4.34%.

India shows why. Airtel gave its 360 million customers a free year of Pro in July 2025, and Perplexity’s Indian monthly users peaked near 22 million that October before falling to about 14 million by July 2026, Sensor Tower data shows.

Our ChatGPT statistics and Claude statistics track the two larger rivals.

What Are Perplexity’s Weak Spots?

Publishers.

Perplexity is defending copyright suits from Dow Jones and the New York Post (filed October 2024), Britannica (September 2025), Reddit (October 2025), The New York Times (December 2025) and CNN (May 2026), plus Nikkei and Asahi in Tokyo.

A judge largely denied its motion to dismiss Reddit’s claims in July 2026. In August 2025 Cloudflare accused it of using undeclared crawlers and removed it from its verified-bot list.

Advertising is off the table for now. Perplexity plans to wind its ad program down by the end of 2026, citing user trust. Meanwhile ChatGPT launched ads, and they hit a $1 billion run rate in August.

That leaves subscriptions and enterprise seats to carry the business, and a $400 million Snap distribution deal announced in November 2025 ended in the first quarter of 2026.

Hire Engineers Who Build With AI Search and Agents

Teams moving off Sonar onto the Agent API need engineers who can wire search, tools and models together and keep the cost in check. We place pre-vetted AI agent developers and AI engineers from nine Asian markets, with profiles in 24 hours.

Tell us the role.

FAQs

Is Perplexity free?

Yes. The free plan covers standard search with a small number of Pro Searches, and the Comet browser is free on all four platforms. Computer, more Pro Searches and premium data start with Pro at $20 a month.

Who owns Perplexity?

Perplexity AI is a private company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, its CEO, with Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho, and based in San Francisco. It has raised about $1.7 billion, and Accel led its 2025 round.

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Written by

Elton Chan

Elton Chan is the Co-Founder of Second Talent, a solution that connects global tech leaders with top-tier tech talent across Asia. He specializes in talent solutions and has led Second Talent’s rapid growth since 2024, helping scale its network to over 100,000 pre-vetted developers and earning industry recognition as the #1 in the Global Hiring category on G2. A long-time entrepreneur with deep roots in digital transformation, Elton previously co-founded Branch8, a Y Combinator–backed e-commerce technology firm, and served as the Founding Chairman of HKEBA, a leading Asia-focused business association driving innovation, digital education, and cross-border collaboration. His work bridges technology, talent, and business strategy to shape how companies scale in an increasingly remote and digital world.

Perplexity AI Features and Capabilities in 2026: The Complete Guide

What Can Perplexity Do in 2026?

How Does Perplexity Search Work?

What Is Perplexity Computer?

How Good Is Perplexity Deep Research?

What Is the Comet Browser?

How Much Does Perplexity Cost?

What Can Developers Build With the Perplexity API?

How Big Is Perplexity in 2026?

What Are Perplexity’s Weak Spots?

Hire Engineers Who Build With AI Search and Agents

FAQs

Is Perplexity free?

Who owns Perplexity?

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