Perplexity vs ChatGPT

The pitch and the catch

Perplexity answers a question and shows you where each part came from. That is exactly what an AI answer should do, and for a while it was the only product doing it properly. If you are researching something unfamiliar and want a map of the sources fast, it is still very good at that specific job.

The catch is that the citations are not a guarantee. They sometimes point at pages that do not support the sentence they are attached to, which is a worse failure than no citation at all, because it looks like verification. Anything you would put your name to needs the sources opened and read. At that point you are doing the work the product claimed to do for you.

The conduct record

This is the part that moves our score rather than our taste.

• •Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York over its answer engine, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. Dow Jones and the New York Post have a similar suit pending.
• •Cloudflare published evidence that Perplexity used undeclared crawlers with rotating addresses to fetch content from sites that had blocked its declared bots, and de-listed it as a verified bot.
• •Brave's security researchers disclosed indirect prompt-injection flaws in Perplexity's Comet browser that let hidden text on a page make the agent exfiltrate a user's email and a one-time password. Brave said the issue was still not fully mitigated after publication.

You can hold the view that scraping disputes are a grey area. The Comet finding is not a grey area, it is an agent that could be instructed by a web page to steal a login code.

What ChatGPT gives up

Honestly, some of the citation discipline. ChatGPT with search on will cite, and it will also happily answer from the model when it should be looking things up. Perplexity's interface makes the sources harder to ignore, and that is a real design advantage.

But ChatGPT is also the image tool, the voice assistant, the code helper and the document reader, for the same money.

How we would buy it

• •One assistant subscription, general use: ChatGPT.
• •Research-heavy work where sourcing matters: use Perplexity's free tier as a starting point, then verify in the primary sources. Do not pay for the confidence.
• •Considering Comet specifically: wait. A browser agent with a documented exfiltration path is not a productivity tool.
• •Wanting citations you can actually trust: there is no product answer to that yet. Open the links.