The Perplexity API Platform is the developer offer of Perplexity, the AI search company. It is a set of web APIs, interfaces that another program calls over the internet, that give software access to Perplexity's real-time web search and to language models. Perplexity states that its own product runs on the same building blocks.
The Search API is one endpoint, POST /search. A program sends a query, or up to five related queries, and gets back ranked web results as JSON: for each result the page title, URL, a snippet of text extracted from the page, and the publication and update dates. There is no generated answer. Filters limit the results to chosen domains, languages, dates or a country. The Agent API instead returns answers grounded in web search, with citations, and can also call models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The Embeddings API turns text into vectors for semantic search.
The platform is pay per use. The Search API is billed per successful request, with no token charges; the Embeddings API is billed per token.