Perplexity has been left behind in the AI wars

Last summer, Perplexity was hot stuff. The CEO of the AI-powered research tool was on the front cover of Fortune magazine, the company itself was about to make a long-shot $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome from Alphabet, and executives at Apple were warning that traditional internet search was starting to feel the pain as users switched to services like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

But a year later, Perplexity’s progress has stalled out.

Per data from Similarweb, US website traffic to perplexity.ai has been broadly flat, adding fewer than 4 million visitors from February 2025 to February 2026, while rival Claude more than quadrupled its web users.

Naturally, Perplexity lags even further behind the true giants of the GenAI game, ChatGPT and Gemini, which racked up 1 billion and 276 million US monthly website visits, respectively, in February.

Confused, baffled, bewildered

From the start, Perplexity was structured somewhat differently to ChatGPT and others. Its primary function was to answer questions as precisely as possible, with its powerful citation framework making it a research tool for many. It isn’t a frontier model maker, instead relying on some of the very LLMs that it competes against for users.

But as models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have progressed, what made Perplexity special has become table stakes. Each is now pretty adept at complex, research-based tasks, with Google incorporating Gemini’s real-time AI overviews and ChatGPT adding…