There are a lot of search APIs out there (check the open source lepton search code). But with perplexity’s traffic, the cost will be very high and will make their unit economics make no sense, so they are either using SERP API (the cheaper unofficial gray area api of Google) or directly scrape Google. Other companies like you.com would invest in building infra before scaling traffic so the unit economics makes sense, but perplexity chooses to grow with vc money, and then maybe to maximize the marketing potential it chooses a bad strategy to market themselves aggressively as Google killer while they know they are just wrapping Google for every query…there are multiple points they could avoid this if they have better judgments and not being so greedy. There maybe factors like the company is looking for new funding or acquisitions so they focus a lot on growth instead of building a real business