# Perplexity Web Search (Sonar)

> Perplexity Web Search (Sonar) is a paid API for AI agents from Perplexity at perplexity.mpp.paywithlocus.com, paid per call via MPP, $0.006 (dynamic), status unknown (last checked 2026-10-10, last successful call 2026-08-19).

Performs real-time AI-powered web search using Perplexity's Sonar engine, returning grounded results with optional filters for recency, domain, language, and date range.

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://perplexity.mpp.paywithlocus.com/perplexity/search?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.006 (dynamic)
- Payment: MPP
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-10
- Last successful call: 2026-08-19
- Success rate: 81% of calls made through Zero
- Rating: 4.3 / 5 from 7 reviews
- Activations on Zero: 27
- Provider: Perplexity
- Docs: https://docs.perplexity.ai
- Website: https://perplexity.ai
- Tags: search, ai-search, web-grounding, sonar, ai
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/perplexity-search-79dc1cbe
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_xMTQkP-Za72aYqYFWSEa-

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability perplexity-search-79dc1cbe -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Search the web for the latest developments on OpenAI's o3 model — limit it to results from the past week, up to 15 results, and only from reputable tech news domains like techcrunch.com and theverge.com.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when an AI agent needs real-time, web-grounded information — especially for recent events, news, or facts that a static model would not know. Prefer it over embeddings or chat endpoints when the goal is retrieval rather than generation. The domain, recency, language, and date filters make it ideal for targeted research tasks where freshness and source control matter.

## Known failure modes

- Empty or vague query returns low-quality or irrelevant results
- Invalid country code (non ISO 3166-1 alpha-2) causes a validation error
- max_results outside 1–20 range causes a parameter error
- Invalid date format (not MM/DD/YYYY) causes a parsing error
- Overly restrictive domain or date filters return zero results
- Network or upstream Perplexity API unavailability returns a 5xx error

## How this service works

Search the web and retrieve ranked results with titles, URLs, snippets, and dates. Supports domain, language, recency, and date range filters.

## Output

Returns a set of web search results grounded in real-time data, including ranked snippets and source references, filtered by any specified recency, domain, language, or date constraints.

## Example request

```json
{
 "query": "artificial intelligence",
 "max_results": 10,
 "search_recency_filter": "month"
}
```

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "required": [
  "query"
 ],
 "properties": {
  "query": {
   "anyOf": [
    {
     "type": "string"
    },
    {
     "type": "array",
     "items": {
      "type": "string"
     }
    }
   ],
   "description": "Search query — a single string or array of queries"
  },
  "country": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Country code for result localization (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2)"
  },
  "max_results": {
   "type": "number",
   "description": "Maximum results to return (1–20, default 10)"
  },
  "search_domain_filter": {
   "type": "array",
   "items": {
    "type": "string"
   },
   "description": "Restrict search to specific domains (max 20)"
  },
  "search_recency_filter": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Time filter: 'hour', 'day', 'week', 'month', 'year'"
  },
  "search_language_filter": {
   "type": "array",
   "items": {
    "type": "string"
   },
   "description": "Language filter (ISO 639-1 codes)"
  },
  "search_after_date_filter": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Only results after this date (MM/DD/YYYY)"
  },
  "search_before_date_filter": {
   "type": "string",
   "description": "Only results before this date (MM/DD/YYYY)"
  }
 },
 "additionalProperties": true
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/perplexity-search-79dc1cbe/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from perplexity.mpp.paywithlocus.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/perplexity.mpp.paywithlocus.com/llms.txt)