Research a Topic with Citations
Get a well-sourced answer to a research question, with the discipline of actually checking the sources rather than trusting the AI's summary of them.
Prerequisites
None
Estimated time
10-20 minutes, depending on how deep you go
Cost
Free — Perplexity's free tier includes unlimited basic search (the deeper multi-step "Pro Search" is capped at 3/day on the free plan, verified 2026-09-18).
Steps
- 1.Perplexity (external AI tool)
Ask your research question directly — the answer comes with inline citations to where each claim was sourced.
- 2.Find and Replace
If you're incorporating the answer into your own document, clean up formatting or replace placeholder terms here.
- 3.Word Counter
Check the final text against any length requirement before submitting or publishing it.
Quality checks
- Click through at least the top 2-3 cited sources yourself for anything you plan to rely on — an AI's summary of a source can occasionally overstate or slightly misrepresent what that source actually says.
If something goes wrong
- If the citations point to low-quality or irrelevant sources, narrow your question to be more specific rather than accepting a broad, weakly-sourced answer.
Privacy
Your question is sent to Perplexity to process — this is not local. The cleanup steps afterward run entirely in your browser.