Imagine a search engine that not only understands your questions but engages in conversation to provide you with more accurate, context-aware answers.

While the world awaits the official launch of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Microsoft Bing fails to capture imaginations, a newcomer is offering a glimpse into the future of search engines.

It may not be a household name yet, but Perplexity.AI has been quietly gaining a fanbase among marketers, researchers, and content creators since its launch in 2022. Founded by a team of experts from OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft, Perplexity reached 15 million monthly active users in April 2024. While this is still a small search market share compared to other more popular search engines, it’s serving a gap that traditional search engines have so far failed to fill.

In this article, we'll gain a deeper understanding of Perplexity’s unique features, benefits, and potential limitations. We'll also discuss how marketers can harness the power of this innovative tool to streamline their research, create compelling content, and optimise their strategies for the era of AI-driven search. 

What Is Perplexity?

The tried and true method of Internet research looks like this: you enter your question or keyword, the search algorithm returns a list of results, and try to sort through them. Although that approach has proven successful for decades, it comes with serious drawbacks. Namely, you might spend minutes or hours reading through multiple pages of content, hoping to find a reliable source that has the information you need.

Perplexity.AI is designed to make online research less tedious and time-consuming. It offers an AI-powered search experience using large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) to quickly provide accurate, contextual, and well-sourced answers. It uses several LLMs including GPT-4, Claude 3, Mistral Large, as well as its own custom models, to understand and answer users’ queries.

What sets Perplexity apart is its ability to understand follow-up questions in the context of previous queries, allowing users to dig deeper into topics and personalise their responses. It’s like having a knowledgeable research assistant at your fingertips, helping you dive deep into any topic to surface valuable insights.

When a user enters a query, Perplexity's language models analyse the context and intent behind the question. It then searches the internet and retrieves relevant information, prioritising newer and more authoritative content from various sources including:

• Academic journals

• Live webpages 

• Reddit 

• News outlets

• Industry reports

• YouTube

Users can also upload and ask questions about specific documents or files, as well as set the search scope (e.g., academic sources only).

The language models process and synthesise the gathered information to generate a coherent answer tailored to the user's query. It then presents the answer in natural language, complete with inline citations to the sources used, allowing users to verify the information or explore further.

Perplexity is available for free or as a paid service, and as a desktop and mobile app. The free version allows you to conduct basic searches and generate responses that include citations. By paying a subscription fee, you can access Perplexity Pro, which includes features such as upgraded AI models,unlimited file uploads, and an enhanced search option. As of April 2024, users can pay $20 per month or $200 per year for premium access to this AI chatbot and research assistant.

What Can Marketers Do With Perplexity?

Perplexity is especially appealing to users who enjoy the conversational nature of a chatbot but also want to check the accuracy of the information they’re gathering. 

Its interactive nature, contextual awareness, and tailored responses make it a versatile and powerful tool for both research and content creation. It can help with brainstorming, research, and other aspects of content creation.

Conducting research: Perplexity’s ability to search a wide range of sources and provide comprehensive summaries makes it an ideal tool for research. Marketers can quickly gather insights on complex topics, target audiences, competitors, and industry trends, enabling them to make informed strategic decisions.

Generating content ideas: By using Perplexity.AI to explore topics related to their industry, marketers can uncover new angles, identify content gaps, and generate fresh ideas for blog posts, articles, and other marketing collateral. The tool's conversational interface makes it easy to dive deep into a subject and discover valuable insights.

Creating data-backed content: The platform’s citations and source integration features allow marketers to create content that is backed by credible data and research. By incorporating statistics, quotes, and findings from reputable sources, marketers can enhance the authority and persuasiveness of their content.

Optimising content for search engines: Marketers can use Perplexity.AI to identify the most relevant and frequently asked questions related to their target keywords. By creating content that addresses these questions and incorporates the insights provided by Perplexity.AI, marketers can improve their search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to their websites.

Staying up-to-date with industry developments: Perplexity.AI's access to current data and its ability to identify emerging trends can help marketers stay informed about the latest developments in their industry. By regularly using the tool to research relevant topics, marketers can adapt their strategies to capitalise on new opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.

Evaluating new tools: A large part of any marketer’s job is staying up-to-date with new software releases and evaluating different tools to see if they would be good additions to your Martech stack. Perplexity is great for this - you can ask it to summarise features and build comparison tables for you so you can quickly get to a shortlist of suitable options. Quite often it can give you tips and tricks on how to get started with your new purchases or provide step-by-step integration advice.

By leveraging Perplexity.AI's features in these ways, marketers can work smarter, create more impactful content, and drive better results for their campaigns. Bear in mind that Perplexity is still in its early stages. Its capabilities and features are likely to expand, offering new ways to leverage AI-based searches in your marketing. 

What Are the Limitations of Perplexity?

As with any generative AI platform, there are concerns about the reliability of information generated by Perplexity. 

The presence of citations eases some of those worries, but they don’t mean you can be complacent about verification. Despite its efforts to provide factual information, Perplexity can still hallucinate answers that have little to no basis in reality. 

When using Perplexity, you might also struggle to get the information you need because of the structure of your prompt. Perplexity is built to understand nuance and context, but it's not foolproof. Unclear or ambiguous search queries could lead to irrelevant or inappropriate responses that don't meet your needs. 

Finally, Perplexity doesn't excel when it comes to generating inventive or playful content. As a research-based tool, its focus is on facts and data. The more creative side of your marketing strategy will still need to come from your human content creators. 

What Does Perplexity Tell Us About the Future of SEO?

The arrival of AI-powered search has sparked concerns about the future of search engine optimisation (SEO). While some marketers may worry that their SEO efforts will become obsolete, the reality is that search engines like Perplexity.AI present new opportunities for brands to reach their target audiences.

According to research by BrightEdge, Perplexity provides an average of 5.28 citations per response, favouring sources that are well-researched, accurate, and valuable to users. In addition, referrals from Perplexity to brand sites have increased 40% month-over-month since January. 

In other words, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is becoming a viable channel for driving organic traffic to your website. Perplexity offers you the chance to get up to speed before the world’s largest search engine launches its AI powered offering.

Perplexity's answers aim to be timely, relevant, and accurate, and it uses those factors when narrowing down potential sources. To get your brand on the citation lists for Perplexity responses, you need to create trustworthy marketing content that it deems credible and valuable to the user community.

For marketers, this means that creating high-quality, authoritative content is more important than ever. By focusing on producing content that satisfies Google’s EEAT (expertise, experience, and trustworthiness) standards, brands can optimise their content not only for traditional search engines but also for AI-first platforms. 

The same efforts to make your content authoritative and trustworthy will pay off with Perplexity too, helping you get your brand on those coveted citation lists. In fact, BrightEdge's research revealed that 60% of Perplexity's citations overlap with the top ten Google organic search results.

• Prioritise quality over quantity: Create in-depth, well-researched content that provides genuine value to your target audience. Use credible sources, cite relevant statistics and studies, and ensure that your content is accurate and up-to-date.

• Demonstrate expertise: Showcase your brand's expertise by creating content written by subject matter experts, thought leaders, and industry professionals. Use author bylines and bios to highlight the qualifications and experience of your content creators.

• Focus on user intent: Understand the needs and goals of your target audience, and create content that directly addresses their questions, challenges, and pain points. Use Perplexity.AI to research questions related to your industry–paying attention to the related questions it generates–and develop intent-focused content that provides clear, actionable answers.

• Optimise for conversational search: As an AI-powered search engine with a conversational interface, Perplexity.AI is well-suited to answering questions and providing context-specific information. Optimise your content for conversational search by using natural language, long-tail keywords, and question-based titles and subheadings.

Can You Add Perplexity to Your Advertising Strategy? 

In its first year of existence, Perplexity was proud to be an ad-free service that relied on premium subscriptions rather than online advertising to generate revenue. This ad-free nature has been attractive to users, particularly ones concerned about advertisers influencing the search results that they receive. 

However, Perplexity recently announced that it will soon begin selling ads. These will be in the form of sponsored content that will appear in the related questions section of the interface. Advertisers will have the ability to influence the follow-up questions that Perplexity displays in response to a user's initial query. When users dive deeper into a topic by asking follow-up questions, Perplexity may start showing a mix of organic and brand-sponsored related questions.

There is currently no specific date given for the launch of ads on the platform, but messaging from Perplexity points to them rolling out advertising sometime in the second half of 2024.

Explore Opportunities With AI Search Engines

When you fully understand its strengths, Perplexity AI has the potential to become more than just a niche search engine you experiment with in your downtime. It can serve as a path to a more efficient and effective marketing strategy where you find answers, build campaign ideas, and source information faster than you currently can with a traditional Google search.

Optimising your content can also help you become a trusted source on Perplexity, potentially increasing your organic web traffic. 

AI-based search engines are an exciting development, but it can be difficult to determine exactly where they fit in with your marketing strategy. At 1827 Marketing, we want to help you maximise the benefits of Perplexity and other tools. Book a demo to learn more about how we can help you leverage AI to generate stronger, more compelling content.