Perplexity replaced Google for most of my research and here is the specific reason why

I want to be precise about what Perplexity is and is not because the way it gets described is often either underselling or overselling it. It is not a replacement for deep research tools. It is not a chatbot that makes things up and sounds confident. It is an AI-powered search engine that gives you a direct answer to your question with citations to the sources it drew from, and for a very wide range of daily research tasks that is exactly what you need.

The citations are the thing that matter most to me. Every answer includes links to the actual source pages so you can verify the claim, read more context or assess whether the source is credible for your purposes. That is the fundamental difference from asking ChatGPT the same question, where you might get a plausible-sounding answer with no way to trace where it came from.

The focused search modes are useful once you know they exist. You can narrow a search to academic papers, Reddit and forums, YouTube content or mathematical sources depending on what you are actually looking for. Searching Reddit specifically for opinions on a product gives you a very different and often more honest signal than standard web results.

Collections let you organize research threads into folders and apply a system prompt to the whole collection. So if you are researching a specific topic you can set context once and have it apply to every search within that project.

The Pages feature turns a research thread into a formatted shareable article automatically, which is useful for anyone who needs to summarize findings for someone else without starting from scratch in a separate document.