By Gavin Phillips
Publication Date: 2025-11-19 18:00:00
Perplexity is often touted as the go-to ChatGPT alternative. It is immensely popular, and the launch of Perplexity Comet, its browser, brought agentic AI browsing to many people for the first time. It was like a real look into the future of the internet.
But at times, Perplexity doesn’t feel right. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but for a while, answers would be oddly slow or feel dumbed down, like Perplexity wasn’t using the AI model selected for the prompt. Now, that’s one of Perplexity’s best features: the ability to switch between models as and when you like.
However, what if Perplexity is automatically downgrading your chats, prompts, and answers without letting you know? Well, you’ll be surprised to learn that’s exactly what happens—and up until it was called out on the Perplexity subreddit, it was hard to even figure out what was going on.
