Perplexity was a big name a few years ago. But, we haven’t heard much out of them lately. There are plenty of posts on social media criticizing Perplexity to that effect. One thing that the posts miss is that Perplexity is still the king of AI search. Google is giving it a run for its money with the AI previews on Google search, but Perplexity still wins out in several measurable ways.

The Criticisms

Over the past couple months, I have been seeing several posts questioning the future of Perplexity. Some pretend they don’t know what it is. Others are baffled about why it even exists. The most viral post got 415k views just for predicting its failure.

OpenRouter Benchmarks

A little over a week ago, the OpenRouter team put out a set of benchmarks for Search. They measured 4 tools with multiple models against 4 benchmarks with 3 criteria, Quality, Value, and Speed. It turns out that Perplexity wins in 11 of the 12 benchmark/criteria combos.

The important thing to remember is that Perplexity is not a frontier model provider. They use the same models we use like Opus or Sol. But, their secret sauce is in how their search tool is optimized when these models use it.

Going Beyond the Training

Frontier models are notorious for scraping the entire internet to gather data for the model training process. They are even consuming older rare books to get any slight edge they can. So, the models have a lot of information available to them already. That does mean that the data is stale as of the moment they were trained. But, search tools like Perplexity improve upon this by performing live search the moment they are prompted. If you have ever been searching for something on Google and made it to page 5 or 6 of the results you know that finding information on the internet is a skill all on its own. There are even memes about getting to the Perplexity is capable of doing deep research going much deeper into the results than any person is willing.

Don’t Count Perplexity Out Just Yet

The benchmark results from OpenRouter highlight the fact that Perplexity isn’t as dead as people think on Twitter. Their product “Computer” is also at the forefront of the “autonomous digital coworker” space. competing with products like Claude Cowork and Manus AI. I personally still use the standard search when a Google AI preview just won’t do.