Perplexity API: build research pipelines.
The Sonar API gives you programmatic access to grounded-with-citations AI. For technical users that means automated research pipelines, integrations, and custom tools — anything that needs answers from the current web, not frozen training data. Let's wire one up, keep the part that matters, and control the cost.
Grounded search, as a building block.
Whatever you build on Sonar inherits Perplexity's research grounding — real sources, citations, and current information. Reach for it whenever a workflow needs answers based on live web data instead of an LLM's training cutoff.
Answers from training data — no live web, no sources you can show. Fine for drafting; risky for current facts.
Searches the live web and returns an answer plus a citations array. Drop-in grounding for any pipeline.
One POST, grounded answer back.
Sign up at sonar.perplexity.ai, get an API key, and the first call looks like any chat-completions request — with one difference in the response.
Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY { "model": "sonar-pro", "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "What's the latest on Microsoft Copilot enterprise adoption?" }] }
{
"choices": [{ "message": { "content":
"Enterprise Copilot adoption accelerated through 2026, with…" }}],
"citations": [
"https://news.microsoft.com/…",
"https://www.reuters.com/…",
"https://sec.gov/…"
]
}
Build a daily-briefing automation.
You want a sourced industry briefing in your team's inbox every morning. Pick the right node for each stage — the wrong ones quietly break it.
Two calls that decide if this is worth running.
Sonar costs more per call than a plain GPT-4 request — you're paying for live search. Budget for it, cache repeated queries, and rate-limit. And always carry the citations through to your output: strip them and you've built a slower, pricier, worse general LLM.
Challenge: ship one Sonar-powered workflow
Pick a single research task you or your team does by hand. Build the simplest possible Sonar automation for it — a script plus an email is enough. Keep the citations in the output, cache where you can, and tag anything written to a system of record as AI-sourced. Then iterate.
What you can do now
- Get a Sonar API key and make a successful first call
- Compose a daily-briefing pipeline: cron → Sonar → format → email
- Always carry the citations through to your output
- Apply cost controls — caching and rate-limiting
- Tag AI-sourced data so it's verified before anyone trusts it