Perplexity AI Search Engine Thinks Out Loud

Perplexity AI is a search engine that thinks out loud.
It listens to a question, scans the living web, and then speaks back in calm paragraphs that already contain the answer, the evidence, and the exact pages where the evidence lives.
Instead of handing the user a stack of blue links, the service weaves those links into its own reply, so every sentence is footnoted in real time.
The result feels like chatting with a research assistant who never sleeps, never forgets a source, and never minds when you ask again, only smarter.
Under the hood the company routes queries to whichever large language model is best suited for the task, tapping OpenAI, Anthropic, and in house systems in the same breath.
This model orchestra lets a shopper ask for the cheapest flight, a coder debug a script, and a student trace the causes of the Thirty Years War without switching tabs or tone.
Users can upload PDFs, spreadsheets, or images and then interrogate them in plain English, turning static files into living documents that answer back.
Each follow up question inherits the context of the last, so the thread grows like a conversation rather than a pile of separate searches.
By stitching citation to summary and curiosity to continuation, Perplexity turns the old hunt and peck ritual of search into something closer to thinking with a very well read friend.