Perplexity for AI agents

Every search engine ranks by relevance. Very few tell you when the page was last touched, and for a whole class of agent questions that is the only thing that matters. What does this API cost today. Is this endpoint still in beta. What did the changelog say this week. Perplexity's search endpoint returns, for every hit, a publication date and a last-updated date, and lets you filter to pages from the last hour. It is the index behind Perplexity's own answer engine, exposed as a plain search.

What Perplexity does well

Two dates per hit. date and last_updated come back on every result. An agent can rank by freshness itself, or discard anything untouched since a cutoff, without fetching the page.

Recency filter to the hour. search_recency_filter accepts hour, day, week, month, or year. For breaking questions, hour is the setting no other engine in the network offers.

The answer engine's index. The retrieval index is the one Perplexity's product uses, tuned for questions rather than keyword matching.

Scoped results. A search_domain_filter of up to ten domains, a country code, and a max_tokens_per_page control on how much snippet text comes back.

Actions and prices through Vaaya

Priced before the call, billed only on success, under max_cost_cents.

A real call

{
  "service": "perplexity",
  "action": "search",
  "params": {
    "query": "Stripe MPP stablecoin minimum charge",
    "search_recency_filter": "week",
    "search_domain_filter": ["docs.stripe.com", "stripe.com"],
    "max_results": 5
  },
  "max_cost_cents": 1
}

Five results from Stripe's own domains touched in the last week, each with its dates, for a cent. A ceiling of zero is refused before the call runs.

When to pick Perplexity, and when not to

Pick Perplexity when freshness decides the answer: prices, statuses, changelogs, availability, anything a stale page would get wrong. Pick it as the corroborating source when Exa's semantic result looks right but might be old.

Pick Exa for descriptive queries where recall matters and for sweeps beyond ten results. Pick Tavily or Linkup when you want the answer written. Pick Brave for an independent keyword index or news with source and age. Pick Valyu for the paper itself.

Gotchas

Results cap at ten per call; this is a precision tool, not a sweep tool. The recency filter applies to the index's view of freshness; corroborate a critical date by reading the page. Perplexity's answer product (Sonar) is not what this calls; this is the search index, priced flat, and the agent writes its own answer from it.

Perplexity's documentation is at docs.perplexity.ai. The search recipe is at /recipes/search-scrape.

Questions

What is the Perplexity Search API?

Direct access to the retrieval index behind Perplexity's answer engine. It returns ranked results with snippets, and each result carries both a publication date and a last-updated date, with an optional recency filter of hour, day, week, month, or year and a domain filter of up to ten sites.

How much does a Perplexity search cost through Vaaya?

One cent per call, up to ten results. Priced before the call and billed only on success, under the maximum cost the agent states.

When is Perplexity the right search for an agent?

When how recent a page is decides the answer. A pricing page, a changelog, a status, or anything where a stale evergreen result would mislead. The per-hit dates and the hour-level recency filter are what the other engines do not offer.