Perplexity: AI-Powered Search and Research for Everyone

Stop searching. Start researching.

Google gives you ten blue links. ChatGPT gives you an answer with no sources. Perplexity gives you a clear, written answer with citations on every claim, drawn from the live web - and a multi-step research mode that can produce a 30-page cited report from a single question.

That is why millions of researchers, students, journalists, and analysts have quietly replaced their default search engine with Perplexity. And that is why this book exists.

Perplexity: The Research Playbook is the comprehensive, plain-English guide to Perplexity AI in 2026 - every plan, every Focus mode, every model, every feature. Written for real people who need to find and synthesize information for school, work, or curiosity, it covers what Perplexity does, when to use which mode, and how to get cited answers you can trust.

What's inside:

• Get oriented and set up. What Perplexity is (and how it differs from Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini), how to choose between Free, Pro ($20/mo), Max ($200/mo), and the Enterprise tiers, and how to set up the web app, mobile apps, desktop apps, the Comet Browser, and the Chrome extension.
• Master the multi-model engine. Sonar (Perplexity's in-house model), GPT-5/5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 4, and the reasoning models including o3 and Claude Sonnet 4.0 Thinking - plus when to choose which.
• Run real research workflows. Quick Search vs. Pro Search, multi-step reasoning with clarifying questions, evaluating and verifying sources, building research from simple to complex, and saving and organizing threads.
• Use the right Focus mode for the job. Web, Academic, Writing, Video, Social, Finance, and Labs - each with practical use cases and walkthroughs.
• Unlock the platform. Spaces for collaborative research with custom instructions and enterprise file sync (Google Drive, SharePoint, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox). Pages for publishing structured cited reports. Deep Research for multi-step investigations with presentations, spreadsheets, dashboards, and websites as outputs. File uploads. Image generation. The Comet Browser. Model Council for comparing outputs across LLMs.
• Get better results. Search and prompting fundamentals tuned to Perplexity, advanced multi-step techniques, and output formatting that's ready to drop into your own writing - citations and all.
• Make it work for your world. Targeted chapters for students and educators (with the Academic Focus mode and a clear take on academic integrity), business teams (Enterprise Pro / Max, team Spaces, governance), and developers using the Perplexity API and Sonar models.
• Stay safe and informed. Honest coverage of citation quality, source bias, the no-ads data model, the Comet Plus publisher support model, and the ethics of AI-powered search.
• 60+ ready-to-use search templates organized by Focus mode and use case.

Whether you are replacing Google for daily questions, writing a market brief, or running a literature review - this is the book that turns Perplexity from a curiosity into your default research tool.

Includes coverage of Pro Search, Deep Research, Spaces, Pages, Comet Browser, Comet Plus, Model Council, the Sonar model family, Enterprise Pro / Max, and every 2026 research feature.