Labs: agentic builds, not searches.
Labs is Perplexity's autonomous mode for long-running tasks. Unlike a search or a chat answer, it takes a prompt and produces a finished artifact — a working web app, a structured spreadsheet, a multi-page report, even a small site. It's the most ambitious of Perplexity's agentic modes. The skill is briefing it well, watching the midpoint, and knowing what you've actually got back.
It builds the thing — and runs for an hour doing it.
A search answers a question; Deep Research hands you a deliverable in minutes; Labs runs autonomously for tens of minutes to hours and comes back with something built. That power cuts both ways: you can hand it a multi-day project, but a long unsupervised run can also wander off course. Briefing and a midpoint check are the whole game.
Labs, or just ask?
Labs is for tasks that produce a built artifact and take real time. Don't spin it up for something a chat answer settles in seconds.
Start a long run — then check in.
You've briefed Labs for a deep market report. Start it. Long runs need monitoring: at the halfway mark, Labs reports its direction — and that's your chance to catch drift before it wastes the back half.
It's a prototype, not a product.
Labs also builds working tools — describe an app and it ships a clickable one. But there's a line between "built" and "ready."
Combine Labs with a Space. Keep an ongoing Space for a topic — sources, notes, instructions accumulating over weeks — then invoke Labs from inside it: "build a 10-slide board briefing from this Space's research." Labs uses the Space as input. One caveat: the deliverable is only as good as the Space's sources, so audit the Space before you generate anything high-stakes.
Five agentic modes, mapped.
That's the whole Perplexity agent stack — each a different shape of "do it for me."
Perplexity Mastery, complete.
You can search with citations, organize in Spaces, order deliverables, stress-test answers across models, and hand Labs a multi-hour build. The next horizon is integration — wiring Perplexity into your CRM, your data, and your workflows.
Try a build prompt in the playground →Challenge: run one Labs task end-to-end
Pick a project you've put off because it'd take days. Brief it tightly for Labs, set it running, and check in at the midpoint to confirm direction. Come back to the finished artifact — and watch the gap between "I should build this someday" and "it's built" shrink to an afternoon.
What you can do now
- Use Labs for finished artifacts and long builds, not quick answers
- Check in at the midpoint to catch a run that's drifting off-scope
- Treat Labs apps and tools as prototypes — QA before production
- Combine Labs with a Space for ongoing research → on-demand deliverables
- Verify data and claims before sharing Labs output externally