Perplexity: A Comprehensive Review for Writers
All about the uber-talented AI assistant
One of my superfans told me to look into Perplexity as a search engine last summer when I was yet again frustrated with Google’s ever-commercial-leaning responses. I’ve been testing Perplexity for the past several months as a research tool, search engine, and an AI assistant.
Here’s an honest assessment of what this tool can and can’t do for writers building sustainable writing businesses.
The short version: Perplexity is a robust, accurate, and remarkably fast AI search engine that combines the power of top AI models with live web search. For writers who need to research topics, verify facts, or explore ideas quickly, it’s become one of my most-used tools. But it’s not perfect.
What Perplexity is
Think of Perplexity as a hybrid between a search engine and a chatbot. When you ask it a question, it doesn’t just pull from a single AI’s training data. It actively searches the web, reads multiple sources, and synthesizes what it finds into a coherent answer. Crucially, it shows you the sources it used, with clickable citations, so you can verify what it tells you.
NOTE: On the paid tier, you can connect Perplexity with your Google Drive, and it will search everything on that drive while it searches the internet. Since I have hundreds of pieces of writing in my drive, this function is a huge plus.
With tools like ChatGPT or Claude, you’re primarily getting stale information from what the model learned during training, with web search as an optional add-on. Perplexity leads with search and verification. It gives real-time results.
For Pen2Profit Academy members, here’s the detailed lowdown. You can join the academy here.