Complete guide to Perplexity AI

Getting started

Go to perplexity.ai and you can start searching without signing up, although creating a free account gives you history and a higher usage limit. Type your question in the main search box as if you were talking to a person, not as loose keywords. By default it answers in Web mode, giving you a direct answer with the sources cited below. When you need something more specific (academic papers only, or a very in-depth analysis), switch the search mode from the selector next to the text box.

Use cases

Advanced setup

1. Choosing the right search mode
   Web for everyday questions, Academic for scientific papers, Pro Search for complex questions with multi-step reasoning, and Research for very in-depth analyses that review hundreds of sources.
2. Creating a Space
   From the Spaces menu, create a workspace for a specific project: add custom instructions, upload your own files, and choose the AI model you want to use inside that space.
3. Choosing the AI model
   With the Pro plan you can manually select among several different language models for your searches, instead of letting Perplexity choose automatically.
4. Uploading files for analysis
   The Pro plan lets you upload files of up to 50MB (PDF, CSV) so Perplexity can analyze them and answer questions about their content.

Tips

• If the initial answer isn't enough, explicitly ask it to "go deeper" or switch to Pro Search instead of rephrasing the same question.
• Use Spaces to organize long research: they keep you from losing the thread across scattered conversations and keep all the context in one place.
• In Academic mode, be specific about the field of study to get more relevant papers.
• Always check the cited sources, especially on technical or medical topics: it lets you verify how reliable the origin of the information is.
• For very open-ended tasks (creating a file, comparing several AI models at once), use the + menu to access advanced features such as Deep Research or Model Council.

FAQ