Perplexity

There is one question to ask: do you need an answer with sources or a conversational partner? Perplexity is for the former, and it opens from Russia without preparation.

What people come to Perplexity to do and whether they will get it: the five most frequent requests to Yandex over a month.

Search volume - Wordstat, Russia region, 06.09.2026

Who it is for. For people looking for facts who want to see where they came from: every answer has links to websites below it, while a deep report gathers dozens of sources in one query. The site opens directly from Russian addresses, verified on 06.09.2026 from Moscow and St. Petersburg nodes. The free plan includes 3 smart searches a day and one deep report a month (vendor help, 02.09.2026).

Who else. For people who need different models in one window: with Pro for $20 a month, you switch between its Sonar 2 and five outside models, from OpenAI to Google; Max adds Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The vendor's full list changes every few weeks and is collected in the questions below.

Who it is not for. For people planning to pay from Russia: the site's checkout does not accept Russian cards, and Apple has not allowed balance top-ups in Russia since 01.04.2026. Also not for those expecting a voice assistant: across a dozen reviews from May-July 2026, voice mode does not work from Russia, and the vendor is silent about it.

Suitable: section 3 gets you to your first answer. If you're choosing between it and ChatGPT, the choice is in section 7.

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Two modes on the first screen: Search answers a question, Computer does work. The free offering is in the first.

Search with an answer. You write a question, the service reads websites and returns coherent text with numbered links; each source has its own tile above the answer. The vendor does not count regular searches; smart searches, where the model reasons through several steps, are limited to 3 a day for free. On the free plan you do not choose the model, the service selects it.

Deep report. Since 14.02.2025, Deep Research breaks a question into subqueries, gathers dozens of pages, and writes a report with charts. One such report is free per month; Pro and Max have a monthly limit, but the vendor does not publish the number (help, 02.09.2026).

Models. On Pro, you switch between its Sonar 2 and five outside models, from OpenAI to Google; Max adds Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol (vendor listings, 06.09.2026). Model Council on Max sends one question to several models at once and combines their answers. The list changes, and the vendor itself says the truth is in your account's switcher, so the full list is in the questions below.

Computer. An agent given an entire task: it searches, writes documents and code, creates presentations, browses websites, and connects to Gmail, Slack, GitHub, or Notion; the vendor's connector catalog has more than four hundred. It launched in late February 2026 for Max only, then opened to all Pro users on 12.03.2026. It runs on credits: 100 credits cost $1, and Pro has no monthly credits, only a one-time bonus.

Comet. The same vendor's Chromium browser with a side assistant: it reads the open tab, fills out forms, and performs tasks across websites. Free for everyone since 02.10.2025, it is available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iPhone. It has its own catalog entry, discussed here in a paragraph.

What the vendor itself shows. The official-channel video from 17.08.2026, “Search vs Computer,” shows a window with a two-mode switcher; the 10.04.2026 video shows Computer on a Mac: the agent's activity feed with terminal commands and a task checklist. The vendor has no complete answer window with sources in its 2026 videos, so the still above comes from its 2025 Deep Research video. We have not run Perplexity ourselves for the task.

From Russia, you can get your first answer without preparation: the site opens directly, and you do not need to sign in for the first question.

Step 1. Open perplexity.ai and ask a question. From Moscow and St. Petersburg nodes, the site returned status 200 on 06.09.2026, and the word “Russia” does not appear once in the vendor's documentation. Do not switch to a foreign address: the vendor warns in its help that changing an IP address more often triggers a Cloudflare check, and advises signing in, as anonymous visitors are checked more often.

Step 2. Ask in Russian. The interface and help are fully translated, with 155 Russian articles versus 191 English ones. The vendor does not promise the answer language, and user experience varies: Habr on 28.08.2026 writes that it answers normally and searches Russian sources, while a RuStore review from 13.05.2026 complains that a third of the words in complex answers are English. For complex topics, practitioners recommend asking in English.

Step 3. Install the app from the Russian App Store or Google Play: it is listed there under the vendor's name, version 26.34.0 from 03.09.2026, with a Russian interface. An aggregator created the RuStore listing; its build is 2.98.0, and because of it, owners of new Samsung phones write “not supported by your device.” Samsung installs the app by default, users report in reviews.

Computer. The vendor distributes Mac and Windows apps from its website; they are not in the Mac App Store. The Comet browser is installed separately from perplexity.ai/comet, and it is also available in the Russian App Store under the vendor's name.

What does not work. Voice assistant: “works only with text,” RuStore users write in a dozen reviews from May-July 2026; the earliest App Store complaint is dated 03.03.2025. The vendor has named neither a reason nor a date, and does not respond to reviews in Russian storefronts.

Steps verified on 06.09.2026 through access tests from Russian nodes, perplexity.ai help, App Store, Google Play, and RuStore listings, and user reviews

Among AI chats, Perplexity is third and has lost more than half its share over a year; among search engines, it is not visible at all.

Share. StatCounter for August 2026 puts ChatGPT at 79.4 %, Gemini at 10.9 %, and Perplexity at 4.34 %. It had 11.1 % in October 2025, and in winter 2026 it was overtaken by Gemini. The counter measures referrals from AI chats to other websites, not users. Perplexity does not appear in the same counter's regular search-engine table, where Google has 91.1 %.

Company funding. Annual revenue passed $750 million by August 2026, up from less than $250 million at the start of the year; The Information, via Reuters, names Computer as the driver. The last confirmed valuation was $20 billion in September 2025; in August 2026, Nvidia discussed investment at a valuation above $30 billion. The company head set 2028 as the IPO date (CNBC, 09.06.2026).

Audience. The vendor does not publish user numbers. The company head named 780 million queries for May 2025; Google Play shows more than 100 million all-time installs. The App Store shows 4.82 from 502 thousand ratings in the US and 4.86 from 37 thousand in the Russian storefront (06.09.2026).

Demand in Russia. «Perplexity» is searched 85 thousand times a month, «perpleksiti» another 75 thousand, and the hottest long-tail queries are about payment and access: «how to pay in Russia», «doesn't work in Russia», «blocked» (Wordstat and suggestions, 06.09.2026). Search demand asks about blocking, while a test says the site opens. Perplexity's position among search tools is shown beneath the card title, and the full tool ranking is on the main page.

The Pro price has not changed since June 2024, but the vendor has two pricing pages with different figures, and neither has a «monthly or annual» toggle.

Free. Regular search without a counter, 3 smart searches a day, one deep report a month, basic file uploads. You cannot choose the model, and there are no images or priority support. In June 2024, there were 5 free smart searches a day.

Pro. $20 per month or $200 per year on the pricing page; 1 790 ₽ and 17 990 ₽ in the Russian App Store. The perplexity.ai/pro listing shows «$17 per month», the annual price averaged per month and labeled as a promotion. Includes model selection, deep reports within a monthly limit, images, and up to 50 files per project. The vendor does not publish Pro quota figures: in June 2024 it promised 600 smart searches a day, in February 2025 «300 and more», and now writes «weekly limit». In May 2026, users complained about 10–20 requests a day, and the vendor replied that the limit depends on how the subscription was obtained.

Max. $200 per month or $2000 per year, with annual billing available only on the site. Beyond Pro, it includes Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, Model Council, Brain memory, and 10 000 Computer credits per month.

Credits. The Computer agent uses a separate currency: 100 credits cost $1. According to the vendor's documentation, a light task costs 100–350 credits and a heavy one up to 2 275, or from a dollar to more than twenty. Pro has no monthly credits, only a one-time 4 000-credit bonus for 30 days; afterward, packages range from $5 for 500 to $100 for 10 000. Regular search does not spend credits.

API separate. A subscription does not include API access. Its Sonar model costs $1 per million input and output tokens (a token is a piece of a word that models use to count text), Sonar Pro costs $3 and $15, and search as a service costs $5 per thousand requests. The vendor retires the old Sonar API on 27.09.2026; its successor is called Agent API.

Paying from Russia. The site checkout accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and four other foreign methods; none are Russian, and user reports say Russian bank cards are declined before the charge. The ruble price remains listed in the App Store, but Apple has not allowed balance top-ups in Russia since 01.04.2026, so purchases are possible only with an existing account balance.

Intermediaries and promotions. Intermediaries do not state their markup in public materials; MTS's top-up listing requires a «US connection region» and was marked «sold out» on 06.09.2026. The vendor has no promotion for Russia: only a year of Pro for Galaxy owners in the US and a $10 student plan remain. How to arrange foreign payment, in the guide to paying for AI services from Russia.

The product sells trust in sources, and exactly nine organizations are suing it over sources, from newspapers to Reddit.

Data. The policy dated 08.07.2026 allows the collection of queries, voice, and browsing history in the Comet browser, and their use «to improve or create products, including our AI models». Training on your data is enabled by default and can be turned off in account settings. The vendor says it does not sell data or send queries to advertisers. The service operates in the US and describes retention as «as long as necessary».

Your content. Ownership remains yours, but the terms give the vendor a free, transferable license to store, modify, and publish uploaded content while it is hosted there. Under the terms, subscriptions are nonrefundable, while the documentation allows 24 hours for a monthly refund and up to three days for an annual one.

Court cases. Dow Jones and New York Post have been suing since 21.10.2024; in August 2025, a New York court denied an attempt to move the case. The New York Times filed suit in December 2025, and CNN did so in May 2026 over 17 thousand pieces; the vendor replied: «facts cannot be copyrighted». Britannica, Reddit, and Japanese publishers are also involved. By September 2026, no case had reached a ruling on the merits.

Amazon case. The only case with an appellate ruling: in March 2026, a court barred the Comet agent from buying on Amazon, and on 04.08.2026, the appellate court lifted the preliminary injunction and remanded the case to the trial court. The panel's reasoning: the user accesses the site, while the agent only helps them.

Page scrapers. On 04.08.2025, Cloudflare accused Perplexity of having its scraper bots change names and addresses to evade website blocks, and removed the company from its verified bot list. The vendor called the publication a marketing stunt. At the same time, it blocked its own site from third-party bots with the same Cloudflare protection: a bare request to perplexity.ai is denied, while pages for this card were captured in a live browser.

Comet. In 2025, three security teams showed how the browser assistant executes commands hidden on a page: Brave on 20.08.2025, Guardio in the same month got the agent to enter a saved card on a fake store, and LayerX on 04.10.2025 described commands in link parameters. The vendor patched the issues, but a repeat Brave test showed the first flaw was not fully fixed. On 18.02.2026, the company decided not to launch ads in answers at all.

The divide is not in the models' intelligence, but in what you want: an answer with verifiable links or a companion for anything.

How the vendor itself divides them. On its Pro storefront, it says: Perplexity is built around searching the live web with links in every answer, while ChatGPT is a chatbot for conversation; use the former for facts and source checking, the latter for creativity. This is the party's position, not our measurement.

The same engines. An OpenAI model is in both: Perplexity has GPT-5.6 Terra alongside Claude and Gemini. OpenAI also has GPT-6 Astra: on Plus, it is available in Work and Codex, while GPT-6 Pro in regular Chat is for Pro, Business, and Enterprise (OpenAI help, 08.09.2026).

Different access from Russia. The ChatGPT site is blocked from Russian IP addresses; it requires a foreign IP address. Neither can be paid for from Russia: ChatGPT paid plans start at $8 per month, Perplexity at $20.

Who else is nearby. Comet from the same vendor takes the assistant into the browser, while Kagi sells ad-free search by subscription.

If you need science. Elicit and Consensus search not the web but peer-reviewed papers and answer with summaries of them.

Russian neighbors. For Russian-language queries, practitioners put Alice AI and GigaChatside by side; we found no comparisons with figures.

In under four years, the answer engine grew into an agent that completes work end to end, accumulated nine lawsuits, and is valued at $20 billion.