From answer engine to infrastructure: Perplexity launches Search API for developers

For AI builders, fresh data is everything, he said, and legacy search agent results page (SERP) scraper APIs are either “stale, restrictive, or shut down.” Enterprises spend thousands of dollars a month on web scrapers to get around this.

There are “compelling reasons” why developers would be interested in Perplexity’s Search API, agreed Thomas Randallresearch director at Info-Tech Research Group. Eliminating crawling, deduplicating, ranking, and staying compliant with robots.txt (which instructs bots what they can and can’t access) can provide a “huge lift” for devs.

“Perplexity’s solution promises to abstract that away,” he said, describing a “plausible niche” where the Search API could become the default large language model (LLM) retrieval layer for startups and internal tools, especially if it integrates with popular models’ APIs.