Doing Research with Perplexity and Other Search-Based Assistants
How answer engines with live citations differ from plain chatbots, and a repeatable method for checking sources and getting trustworthy research.
Perplexity is an answer engine: you ask a question, it searches the web, and it writes a response with numbered links to its sources. Other assistants, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and Claude, can also search in many setups. The method below applies to all of them, and it is built on one rule: a citation is a lead to check, not proof.
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