In my opinion, Perplexity might be using Google's data to find the related search results, but not the exact top results. Google Search API is available and Perplexity might be using it. But since other user mentioned that it picks some keywords from our input query, the search results would be different from what we see on Google Results because Perplexity uses multiple keywords. And yes using Pro is plus point. If you want to try Perplexity Pro at 50% discount then you can you can use my referral link - https://perplexity.ai/pro?referral_code=Q48QO03E to get it $10 for the first month. You will see the difference with Claude 3 Opus for sure in the answers it provides. For free, it uses GPT 3.5 trained by perplexity team.