By Alex Morgan
Publication Date: 2026-02-05 14:00:00
Perplexity Deep Research hit 93.9% accuracy on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark in February 2025—but that’s not why developers are switching from ChatGPT. The real story is speed: Deep Research completes most tasks in under 3 minutes, while ChatGPT Pro takes significantly longer for comparable research queries. For a developer researching API documentation or a PM validating market data, that difference changes whether you use the tool five times a day or once. Add in 50 sources cited per report versus ChatGPT Pro’s typical 20, and you have a tool optimized for a specific job—fast, cited research—rather than conversational depth.
I tested Deep Research against ChatGPT Pro on technical queries last month. The speed advantage is real, but so are the trade-offs. Deep Research launched on February 14, 2025 with PDF and Perplexity Pages export, free for all users at 5 queries per day (non-Pro) or 500 queries per day (Pro). A year later, it remains state-of-the-art on factuality benchmarks, but the architecture reveals why it wins on speed and loses on conversation. Here’s what the numbers actually mean for your workflow.
Perplexity Deep Research dominates SimpleQA—but speed is the real story
The 93.9% SimpleQA score positions Deep Research as the factuality leader among AI search tools, exceeding OpenAI o1-preview and GPT-4o on OpenAI’s own benchmark. SimpleQA tests whether models answer…
