Perplexity tops Artificial Analysis Search Index with new API, beating rivals by wide margin

Perplexity just claimed the top spot on a brand-new leaderboard designed to measure how well search APIs actually perform when plugged into AI agents. The Artificial Analysis Search Index, which launched on August 18, gave Perplexity’s medium Search API configuration the highest score of 80, putting it ahead of Parallel Search at 75 and Exa Search at 74. To put that 80 in perspective: running the same tasks without any search tool at all produced a baseline score of just 33. That’s a 47-point lift, which is the kind of gap that makes you wonder why anyone would run an AI agent without search plugged in. How the benchmark works The Artificial Analysis Search Index isn’t just one test. It combines three separate benchmarks: DeepSearchQA, BrowseComp, and AA-Omniscience, totaling 1,700 questions across varied research domains. Every search API was evaluated against a fixed GPT-5.6 Luna model running within the Stirrup agent harness framework. Think of it as a controlled experiment where the model stays the same and only the search tool changes, isolating exactly how much value the search layer adds. The index grades on three dimensions: answer quality, cost per task, and processing tim...