Perplexity

AI search engine with citations. Returns answers grounded in live web results, with source URLs attached. The wiki tracks Perplexity primarily as a tool that other systems call — it’s the canonical “real-time-search” primitive for AI agents.

API surface

Three model tiers exposed via API:

• Sonar — cheap (~$0.02/req), good for general live lookups
• Sonar Pro — better quality, higher cost
• Sonar Deep Search — full deep-research-style multi-hop reasoning

Minimum API top-up ~$5.

Where Perplexity shows up in this wiki

• n8n Perplexity node (v1.98+) — first-class node + AI Agent tool slot. Closes the real-time-search loop for n8n agents. See summary-zubair-trabzada-perplexity-node-n8n.
• AgentZero — Perplexity is the canonical free MCP integration in the AgentZero quickstart.
• MCP ecosystem — perplexity-mcp is one of the most-installed third-party MCP servers.

Why it matters

Perplexity is the wiki’s default answer to “how does an AI agent know what’s true right now?” — it’s the real-time complement to long-term memory (Zep, OpenBrain) and short-term context (the LLM’s own window). Increasingly bundled as a built-in node or first-class MCP server, which is the same MCP-as-growth-hack pattern Anthropic gets credit for.

Sources

• n8n Just Made AI Agents 10x Smarter NEW Perplexity Node — first-class n8n integration
• AgentZero — Perplexity as free MCP integration

See Also

• n8n — primary integration in this wiki
• MCP — the protocol the cross-host integrations use
• Zep / OpenBrain — long-term memory siblings
• AgentZero