Key Takeaways

• Perplexity’s core advantage is real-time web search combined with source citations on every claim, making it superior to ChatGPT and Claude for research tasks.
• Deep Research mode analyzes dozens of sources and produces comprehensive reports in under three minutes, scoring 93.9% on the SimpleQA factuality benchmark.
• Pasting a YouTube URL into Perplexity extracts the transcript and delivers a structured summary, saving users from watching 20-minute videos full of filler.
• Perplexity outperforms Google for product and service comparisons by synthesizing reviews, specs, and pricing from multiple sources into a single answer.
• The Spaces feature lets users create persistent, topic-specific research environments with uploaded files and custom instructions.
• Perplexity processed over 780 million search queries in May 2025 and is available in 238 countries, supporting 46 languages.

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Every major AI tool has a sweet spot. Claude excels at long-form writing and nuanced reasoning. ChatGPT handles creative brainstorming and conversational coding. Gemini integrates tightly with Google’s ecosystem and image generation. Perplexity, however, occupies a different niche entirely: it is a research-first answer engine that searches the web in real time, synthesizes information from multiple sources, and attaches clickable citations to every claim it makes.

That citation layer is what separates Perplexity from the rest. While ChatGPT and Claude generate responses based on training data with knowledge cutoffs, Perplexity pulls fresh information from the live web and shows exactly where each fact came from. According to Perplexity’s own benchmarks, its Deep Research mode scores 93.9% accuracy on SimpleQA, a factuality test consisting of several thousand questions, far exceeding other leading models. For anyone whose work depends on verified, current information rather than eloquent prose or creative output, Perplexity is the right tool. Here are six specific tasks where it consistently outperforms the alternatives.

1. Deep Research With Verified Sources

Traditional AI chatbots produce fluent answers, but you have no way to confirm whether those answers are accurate without doing your own verification. Perplexity eliminates that problem. Every sentence in a Perplexity response includes a numbered footnote linking to the original source, whether that source is a news article, an academic paper, a government filing, or a company report.

The Deep Research mode takes this further. When activated, Perplexity spends two to four minutes iteratively searching, reading documents, and refining its research plan before producing a structured report. On the Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark, which covers over 3,000 questions across 100+ subjects, Perplexity Deep Research achieved a 21.1% accuracy score, significantly higher than Gemini Thinking, o3-mini, o1, and DeepSeek-R1.

Pro subscribers can also narrow searches to specific source types. The Focus feature lets users restrict results to scholarly journals, social media, video content, or mathematical sources. One Reddit user working in commercial construction described using Perplexity to sweep for all recent news articles and filings about megaprojects in a single prompt, replacing what had previously been hours of individual Google searches and link-by-link verification.

For professionals in finance, law, medicine, or journalism, where getting a fact wrong carries real consequences, Perplexity’s approach of showing its work is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire point.

2. Fact-Checking Claims and Resolving Contradictions

Misinformation spreads fast, and even well-sourced articles can contradict each other. Two publications may cover the same medical study and reach opposite conclusions. Perplexity is built for exactly this kind of problem.

Because it pulls from multiple live sources simultaneously, Perplexity can surface the points of agreement and disagreement across different publications in a single response. One practical prompt structure for this: ask Perplexity to summarize the main arguments for and against a topic, highlight where sources agree and disagree, and indicate which arguments carry the strongest supporting evidence.

One Perplexity user described using the reasoning R1 model specifically for this purpose, noting that it helps weight contrasting information and distinguish well-supported claims from propaganda. The same user cautioned that fact-checking fake news requires multiple prompts because disinformation campaigns are often SEO-optimized, meaning the top search results may themselves be unreliable. Perplexity handles this better than a standard Google search because it synthesizes across sources rather than ranking individual pages.

For health, policy, and science topics where outdated advice persists for years after newer research has contradicted it, Perplexity also works well with time-scoped queries. Users can ask it to summarize findings from the past six months or two years, highlight consensus shifts, and flag areas where disagreement still exists.

3. YouTube Video and Podcast Summarization

A 20-minute YouTube video might contain three minutes of useful information buried inside filler, ads, and repetitive intros. Perplexity can extract the transcript from a YouTube video and produce a structured summary in seconds, provided the video has a transcript available.

This capability ranks among the most popular use cases cited by Perplexity’s community. Users paste a YouTube URL directly into the search bar, and Perplexity returns the key arguments, main points, and structure of the video without requiring any additional prompt. Several users report using this for podcast episodes, educational lectures, and news commentary.

There is an important caveat: Perplexity can only summarize videos that have an available transcript. If no transcript exists, the tool cannot analyze the content. Some users have built dedicated Spaces with custom instructions that automatically treat any pasted YouTube URL as a summarization request and include safeguards against extrapolating content from just the video title, a known failure mode where AI tools fabricate summaries based on metadata alone.

For anyone who consumes large amounts of video content for research or professional development, this feature alone can save hours per week.

4. Product and Service Comparisons

Choosing between competing products, whether software subscriptions, laptops, or financial services, typically means opening a dozen browser tabs, cross-referencing review sites that may have different testing criteria, and trying to reconcile conflicting ratings. Perplexity condenses that process.

A well-structured comparison prompt asks Perplexity to rank options based on specific variables: cost, ease of use, long-term downsides, and trade-offs relevant to the user’s situation. Because Perplexity searches across review sites, forums, official product pages, and pricing databases simultaneously, it can produce a comparison that accounts for more data points than any single review article.

Users report that this works particularly well when they already have a shortlist and need help making a final decision rather than browsing from scratch.

5. Organized Research With Spaces

Perplexity’s Spaces feature turns the tool from a one-off search engine into a persistent research environment. A Space is a dedicated container where users can upload files, set custom instructions, choose a preferred AI model, and maintain context across multiple threads.

The practical applications users have built with Spaces are diverse. One user created a Space for stock analysis with a value investing strategy, including custom instructions that tell Perplexity to look up specific data points like current price, 52-week range, dividend yield, and simulated five-year returns for any ticker symbol entered. Another user uploaded their medication list and health history to get tailored answers about diet, exercise, and supplement interactions. A business owner uploaded industry regulations and uses Perplexity to compare their internal documents against compliance requirements.

Spaces effectively give Perplexity a form of persistent memory within a defined scope, solving one of the biggest complaints about AI tools: the need to re-explain context in every conversation.

6. Real-Time Tracking and Current Events

Perplexity accesses the live web with every query, which makes it the natural choice for any question where the answer changes frequently. Stock prices, election results, sports scores, breaking news, policy changes, and regulatory updates all fall into this category.

One federal employee described using Perplexity to stay current on Executive Orders and Office of Personnel Management memos. A finance professional uses it for competitive analysis and due diligence on investment opportunities. A market researcher in commercial construction tracks the progress of megaprojects by asking Perplexity to list all recent news articles and filings about a specific project without summarizing or consolidating the results, preventing the tool from hallucinating project status details.

This is where Perplexity’s advantage over ChatGPT and Claude is most stark. Both of those tools rely primarily on training data with knowledge cutoffs, meaning they cannot answer questions about events that happened yesterday or last week without additional plugins or integrations. Perplexity’s entire architecture is built around live web access, making real-time queries its default behavior rather than an add-on feature.

When to Use Perplexity vs. Other AI Tools

Perplexity is not the best tool for every AI task. It is specifically designed for information retrieval, verification, and synthesis. For long-form creative writing, Claude remains stronger. For complex multi-step coding projects, ChatGPT and Claude both outperform Perplexity. For image generation, Gemini and dedicated tools like Midjourney are better choices.

The clearest way to decide: if your task requires finding, verifying, or comparing information from the current web, start with Perplexity. If your task requires generating original content, reasoning through complex logic, or building software, use a different tool.

Perplexity processed over 780 million queries in May 2025 and serves users across 238 countries in 46 languages. Its growth, roughly tripling in under a year, suggests that a large number of people have reached the same conclusion: when accuracy and sources matter more than creativity, Perplexity is the right AI to use.

If you are interested in this topic, we suggest you check our articles:

• How Does Perplexity Compare Against Other GenAI Models?
• Perplexity’s Challenge to Google’s Search Dominance
• New to AI? Best Advice for Beginners in 2026

Sources: Reddit, XDA Developers

Written by Alius Noreika