Perplexity

Perplexity reframes chat as a search engine with prose answers. Every response is studded with small numbered citation chips that link to the web pages the answer drew from, and a strip of source cards sits above the text so you can audit the reasoning before trusting it. The composer offers a focus selector to scope a query to academic papers, video, or the general web. Below each answer, suggested follow-up questions invite you to drill deeper without retyping context, turning one question into a branching research session. The citation-forward design is its whole identity and its main tension: the footnotes build trust, but the synthesized prose still paraphrases sources in ways that occasionally drift from what the cited page actually says.