Perplexity's Sonar-Reasoning-Pro just tied Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro for first place on LM Arena's new Search Arena leaderboard. Perplexity models locked down the top ranks by outperforming OpenAI's search models and citing two to three times more sources, winning 53% of direct head-to-head battles against Gemini.
Perplexity just rolled out major upgrades to its Sonar models, adding High, Medium, and Low search modes so developers can balance search depth with compute costs. The company is also waiving fees for citation tokens across responses. Internal benchmarks show Sonar outperforming search-enabled GPT-4o at a fraction of the price.
Perplexity just rolled out a new version of its in-house Sonar model, powered by Cerebras chips to generate answers at a blazing 1,200 tokens per second. Built on Llama 3.3 70B, it beats GPT-4o mini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in user satisfaction testing while answering almost instantly. It is now live for Pro subscribers.
Perplexity just rolled out its Sonar API, letting developers bake real-time web search with citations straight into their apps. The service comes in two tiers—standard Sonar and 200k-token Sonar Pro—with base pricing starting at $5 per 1,000 searches. Why it matters: Perplexity is productizing its core consumer moat into an API, taking direct aim at Google and OpenAI.
