By Alan Bradley
Publication Date: 2026-04-13 19:00:00
Despite growing competition from AI chatbots, Google still dominates the search engine market. And looking at chatbots alone, ChatGPT is the clear winner. So how do you compete with that? Perplexity bills itself as a free AI-powered “answer engine,” and it’s picked up enough steam to score an integration on Samsung’s Galaxy S26 lineup. But how well does it do its job? To find out, I replaced my day-to-day Google searches with Perplexity AI queries for a week.
As an AI “research assistant,” Perplexity lets you to filter sources (“academic only,” for instance), while a Focus mode lets you narrow results to those drawn from a particular site or category. What stands out to me compared with rival AI chatbots is that Perplexity provides inline, numbered citations for every output. Also, unlike some of its competitors, Perplexity draws on real-time web results rather than relying primarily on training data, and it can leverage multiple models to answer queries.
However, to quote The Wire’s Omar Little, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” So did Perplexity hold up against the undisputed champ? Let’s dive in.
Setting Up My Parameters
To test its functionality, I put Google aside for a week and relied solely on Perplexity AI. As a tech and science writer, I use search a lot to provide context for topics or to deep-dive into topics like scientific principles and manufacturing histories. I’m also writing a science-fiction novel heavily based in real…
