Perplexity

Overview

An answer engine that responds to questions in a few sentences and shows links to the sources it used. It works more like a search tool than a chatbot.

General use

People use it for quick research, fact checking, and market or competitor lookups when they want an answer plus citations they can verify.

Insight

Good for research where you need to see where each claim came from, so it invents facts far less than a plain chatbot. The weak spot: it answers direct questions well but does not work through long, multi-step problems. A good pattern is to run it as the first pass on a research task, gather the links, then hand those to a stronger AI for the deeper analysis.