Research and Build with Perplexity

What you’ll learn

Use Perplexity as an answer engine: check its sources, set your preferences, pick the right mode, organize projects in Spaces, and turn research into reports, pages, and scheduled updates.

Key steps

1. 1

   Learn the core loop: ask, check sources, follow up.

   Ask a question and read the numbered citations attached to each claim. Hover or click a number to open the source page. Glance at what it read before trusting an answer — many strong sources agreeing means the answer holds; a couple of weak blogs means ask it to look harder. Keep follow-up questions in the same thread.

2. 2

   Set your personalization once.

   Open settings under your account icon and write a short introduction: how you want answers structured, your units and region, and whether it should ask a clarifying question when your request is vague. Set a response length, review the data-retention option, and turn off email notifications you do not want.

3. 3

   Choose the mode and sources for each question.

   Search is the fast default for everyday questions; Pro Search handles comparisons that need several pages weighed; Deep Research builds a full cited report over several minutes. Name where it should look — for example forum threads for real user experience or academic papers for studies — and end a comparison question with 'answer as a table' when you want a table.

4. 4

   Write a clear brief for Deep Research.

   State what you are deciding, what the report must include, which sources to trust, and the form you want the answer in. The sources line matters most: preferring owner surveys and official filings over reviews gives you a report built on numbers. When the report arrives, open the sources tab and spot-check the two claims your decision leans on hardest.

5. 5

   Keep a project together in a Space.

   Create a Space for any multi-day piece of work. Write instructions for how it should behave and attach the files it should work from — the rule is that anything you would retype in every thread belongs in the instructions. Every thread inside the Space starts with that context already loaded.

6. 6

   Turn research into something finished.

   Use the create options to turn research into a formatted report, spreadsheet, dashboard, or slide draft, and use 'convert to page' to share a cited thread as a link. On paid plans, scheduled tasks can check a topic on a cadence and email you changes. Check the numbers against the listed sources before sending anything out — once it is your report, the mistakes are yours too.