Perplexity Spaces lets you limit searches to custom domains

When doing serious research with AI, getting too many answers is often worse than getting none at all, especially when the tool pulls from sketchy blogs instead of primary documentation.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas rolled out a clean fix for that within Perplexity Spaces: the ability to lock your searches down to specific web domains and uploaded files.

Inside the Spaces interface, you will find a new source menu where you can plug in designated URLs. Once added, Perplexity keeps a running list of your chosen sources, and any queries inside that Space will focus solely on those domains and your uploaded files instead of sweeping the entire open web.

Building a walled garden for your research

Basically, this update turns Perplexity Spaces into a whitelist-powered research assistant.

Perplexity has already been pushing deeper into enterprise and team workflows, notably with its Internal Knowledge Search feature that blends internal files with live web data. But when the engine went out to the broader internet, you still had to trust its algorithmic judgment on which sites mattered.

With custom domain filtering, that uncertainty disappears. If you are tracking regulatory updates, you can pin official government portals. If you are an engineer debugging a framework, you can restrict queries strictly to official docs and GitHub repos, filtering out outdated Stack Overflow clones and SEO spam entirely.

Why it matters

We think this is one of those small interface tweaks that fundamentally shifts how useful an AI tool feels day to day.

For power users, analysts, and developers, open-web search often produces bloated summaries that require double-checking every single citation. Being able to define your own boundaries turns a generic chatbot into a precision tool. It is definitely worth testing right away if you run recurring research projects or curate internal team playbooks.

It also highlights Perplexity's broader playbook against standard search engines. Instead of competing purely on who has indexed the largest chunk of the internet, Perplexity is optimizing for context control. By letting users curate both internal files and external domains in one bucket, Spaces is quietly becoming a lightweight, personalized research OS.

That said, the approach puts the burden of source curation squarely on the user. If you box your domain list in too tightly, you risk missing valid answers that live just outside your chosen links.