Frequently Asked Questions

The answers you get from the API should closely resemble the default search answers in the UI. The API uses the same search subsystem as the UI with small differences in configuration. However, you could be seeing differences between the API and UI due to the following reasons:

Pro Search

The API doesn’t support Pro Search today. Pro Search uses a multi-step reasoning process which increases the quality of the answer.

Using third party models

At this time, the API only supports the Sonar models. Using other third party models like GPT-4o/Sonnet 3.5 in the UI could lead to diverging results.

Tuning of sampling parameters (presence_penalty, top_p etc) and system prompt in the API

Our defaults are tuned to give the best results from the API and match the default search experience in the UI. We give users the power to tune the API to their respective use cases and custom tuning to specific use cases might lead to less generalization of the API/different results vs the UI. We recommend not to explicitly provide sampling parameters in your API requests if you want parity with the default experience in the UI.

We collect the following types of information:

API Usage Data: We collect billable usage metadata such as the number of requests and tokens. You can view your own usage in the Perplexity API dashboard.

User Account Information: When you create an account with us, we collect your name, email address, and other relevant contact information.

Yes! You can use the Perplexity Sonar Models, which leverage information from Perplexity’s search index and the public internet.

You can find our rate limits here.

We email users about new developments and also post in the changelog.

Please fillout this form if you require a rate limit increase for commercial purposes. We consider rate limit increases on a case by case basis.

401 error codes indicate that the provided API key is invalid, deleted or belongs to an account which ran out of credits. You likely need to purchase more credits in the Perplexity API dashboard. You can avoid this issue by configuring auto-top-up.

Currently, we do not support fine-tuning.

Please reach out to api@perplexity.ai or support@perplexity.ai for other API inquiries. You can also post on our discussion forum and we will get back to you.

We do not guarantee this at the moment.