Imagine instructing an AI chatbot to scour the internet, identify specific sources, and compile a thorough report based on the information it collects. That’s exactly what Gemini offers for $20 a month—or if you opt for ChatGPT, that will be $200 per month.
On the other hand, Perplexity provides this for free, but with some limitations. Their latest feature, dubbed Deep Research, operates similarly to offerings from OpenAI and Google’s Gemini.
So, what’s the excitement all about? Picture it as your own research assistant, eliminating the tedious task of gathering sources, making notes, and presenting you with a polished report.
Completing such a task requires significant computational resources, resulting in added costs. Perplexity will allow its subscribers unlimited Deep Research queries, while free users can expect to see “a limited number of answers per day.”
According to the company, “It excels at a variety of expert-level tasks—from finance and marketing to product research—meeting high standards on Humanity’s Last Exam.” Currently, Deep Research by Perplexity focuses exclusively on web content, but mobile app versions for Android and iOS are on the horizon.
To initiate a Deep Research query, users simply select the corresponding option from the dropdown menu next to the text field. Once the research process is completed, users can export the results directly as a document or PDF file.
There’s even a feature that allows you to convert your findings into an online Perplexity Page, shareable via a web link. Additionally, Gemini users can directly import their results into Google Docs.
Perplexity claims that its Deep Research feature surpasses Google’s Gemini model in terms of analytical capabilities, along with OpenAI’s o3-mini and o1 models, as well as the newly minted DeepSeek-R1 model. It only trails OpenAI Deep Research when it comes to the Humanity’s Last Exam benchmark.
Having extensively utilized Gemini Deep Research for searching scientific articles and archives, I can confirm it excels at extracting relevant information and distilling it into digestible insights. It’s also quite adept at retrieving notices from government agencies and managing legal updates effectively.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, recently stated that the company will provide two Deep Research queries for free users each month. Those subscribed to ChatGPT Plus, priced at $20 monthly, will receive up to 10 Deep Research queries each month.
