There’s a well-known problem with AI assistants: they sometimes make things up. Ask ChatGPT a factual question and it will answer confidently — but the answer may be outdated, partially wrong, or in some cases completely fabricated. In the industry, this is called “hallucination.”
For many business tasks, this is manageable. If you’re using AI to draft a marketing email or brainstorm ideas, a confident-sounding error is easy to spot and correct. But for research — finding competitor pricing, checking regulations, verifying a supplier’s credentials, understanding a new market — a confident wrong answer is actively dangerous.
Perplexity AI was built to solve this specific problem.
What Perplexity Is
Perplexity is an AI-powered research assistant that searches the web in real time, reads the sources, synthesises an answer, and — critically — shows you exactly which sources it drew on.
Instead of generating an answer from its training data (which has a knowledge cutoff and can be wrong), Perplexity searches the live web for every query, reads the current content, and builds its response from what it finds. Every claim in its response can be traced back to a specific source you can click through and verify.
It’s less like a conversational AI assistant and more like an extremely well-read research analyst who can search the entire internet in seconds.
How It Differs From ChatGPT
The key differences:
Sources vs. no sources. ChatGPT produces answers from its training data without showing you where the information came from. Perplexity cites every source inline, so you can verify claims immediately.
Real-time vs. training cutoff. ChatGPT’s knowledge has a cutoff date. Perplexity searches the live web, so it can answer questions about things that happened yesterday.
Research vs. conversation. ChatGPT excels at conversation, creative work, and generating content. Perplexity excels at finding and synthesising factual information from current sources.
Neither is universally better — they’re best used for different tasks.
What Perplexity Does Well for Businesses
Competitor research. “What are the current prices for IT support packages in Gibraltar?” or “What are my local competitors saying about their services?” Perplexity searches the web and synthesises the answer from real sources, not from outdated training data.
Market and industry research. Understanding a new market, researching regulations, or finding out what’s happening in a sector. Perplexity can pull together information from multiple current sources into a coherent summary.
Supplier and partner due diligence. Researching a company before entering a contract. Finding news about them, checking reviews, understanding their market position.
Regulatory and compliance questions. Business regulations change. Perplexity can search current guidance from official sources — though for anything consequential, you should always verify with a professional.
Staying current in your field. “What are the latest developments in cloud security for SMBs?” or “What are businesses in Spain doing with AI this year?” — questions where recency matters.
Fact-checking. Received a piece of information you want to verify? Perplexity will search for corroboration from multiple sources and show you what it finds.
The Spaces Feature
Perplexity Pro includes a feature called Spaces — private research environments where you can upload your own documents and have Perplexity search both the web and your internal documents simultaneously.
For a small business, this means you could upload your company policies, product documentation, or client contracts, and then ask Perplexity questions that draw on both your internal knowledge and current web information.
This is particularly powerful for knowledge management — making it easier for staff to find answers in internal documentation without reading through everything manually.
A Real Business Use Case: A Gibraltar Financial Services Firm
Consider a small financial services firm in Gibraltar preparing a report for a client considering investment in a particular sector. The research process might typically involve:
- Hours of manual web searching
- Reading multiple articles and reports
- Cross-referencing information from different sources
- Summarising findings into usable format
With Perplexity, the same research might look like this:
- Ask Perplexity to summarise the current state of that sector, with sources
- Ask specific follow-up questions about regulatory changes, key players, and recent news
- Upload relevant internal documents to cross-reference against the web findings
- Review the cited sources for the most critical claims
The research that might take half a day can be completed in a fraction of the time — with the added confidence of knowing exactly where each piece of information came from.
Pricing
Perplexity has a genuinely useful free tier — you get access to the core search-and-answer functionality with limited daily searches using the most powerful model.
Perplexity Pro costs around €18–20/month (pricing varies by region) and includes unlimited searches, access to more powerful AI models, file uploads, the Spaces feature, and image analysis.
For businesses that use research as a significant part of their work, Pro is worth the cost. For businesses with lighter research needs, the free tier may be sufficient.
What Perplexity Is Not Good At
Perplexity is not the right tool for:
- Writing and editing content. It can generate text, but ChatGPT or Claude produce better written output.
- Creative and generative work. Brainstorming, creative writing, or generating marketing concepts.
- Building and automating workflows. For custom AI agents and process automation, Claude’s API is the better choice.
- Highly sensitive internal information that shouldn’t be shared with any third-party AI service.
Where It Fits in a Business AI Stack
Perplexity works best as a complement to other AI tools rather than a replacement:
- ChatGPT or Claude for writing, editing, and content generation
- Perplexity for research, fact-checking, and current information
- Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini for working within your existing office suite
Together, these cover most business AI use cases. The total cost is modest — Perplexity Pro plus ChatGPT Plus is less than €40/month, and if you’re already on Microsoft 365, Gemini may already be included.
W3IT helps businesses across Gibraltar, Estepona, Marbella and the Costa del Sol understand and implement AI tools that fit their actual needs. If you’re not sure which tools are right for your business, an AI Readiness Assessment is the right starting point.