Search the web

Perplexity Search API

Web search API that returns ranked results as JSON with query-relevant page text, without a generated answer.

Billing

Pricing model: Prepaid credits, charged per successful request9
Free tier: Not published1
Card required for free tier: Not published1
Minimum spend: 10 USD minimum credit purchase when provisioned through Stripe Projects; none stated for the console9
Billing period: No fixed period; credits are drawn down, with optional auto top-up7

Prices

Billed per successful POST /search; a request with up to 5 queries is one unit. No token charges. 5.00 USD / 1,000 = 0.005 USD per request.

Item	Price per 1,000 requests
Search API, `search_type: "web"` (default)	5.00 USD
Search API, `search_type: "fast"`	1.00 USD

Source1Pricing

Other charges

Agent API web_search tool (standard): 2.50 USD per 1,000 invocations, plus model tokens1
Failed or rate-limited requests: Not billed1
Sonar Chat Completions: Support ended on 27 September 2026; requests are being reformulated as Agent API requests11

Read from Perplexity AI’s own pages on 2026-11-04. Every number links to the page a value came from. For agents, the same facts as markdown: /tools/search-the-web/perplexity.md