Perplexity Search
Perplexity Search is Perplexity's web search, offered to developers as an API that returns ranked web results instead of a written answer.
Perplexity Search is the web search Perplexity offers on its own, through its Search API. You send it a query and it sends back a ranked list of web pages, each with a title, an address, a snippet of matching text and a date. It doesn't write an answer.
It matters to marketers because other tools are built on it. An AI agent, a research assistant or a company's in-house chatbot can use the Search API to find pages, and then hand them to a model of its own choosing. If your page isn't in those ranked results, whatever is built on top can't use it.
How it differs from asking Perplexity
When you ask Perplexity a question in its app, you get a written answer with numbered sources. The Search API stops a step earlier, at the list of results. Perplexity's documentation says to use it when you want ranked results your own code filters, stores or passes to a model, and to use its Agent API when you want a finished answer with citations.
The API can narrow results by domain, by date, by country and by language. So a developer can ask for results from the last week, or only from review sites, or only from pages in German.
An example
A travel booking company builds a chatbot that answers questions about coffee shops near its hotels. For each question, it sends a query to the Search API, such as "specialty coffee near Leeds station," and passes the top ten results to its model.
Kestrel Roasters' café page ranks third for that query, so the chatbot reads it and can name Kestrel. Fernhill Coffee's café page gives its address only in an image, so the page has little text that matches the query, and it doesn't make the top ten. The chatbot never reads it.
What this means for you
Treat it like any search engine. Pages that answer a clear question in plain text, with a title that names its subject, give a search system something to rank and a useful snippet to show.
AnswerOrbit asks the Perplexity app itself, as someone who isn't signed in. We don't query the Search API, so what tools built on it return isn't part of your numbers. See How we count.