Perplexity announced the addition of fast search to its search API, with retrieval and sorting running on its self-developed Rust service, Photon. The company claims that a small team of engineers, along with hundreds of intelligent agents, built it, with 95% of search results returned within 230 milliseconds. This interface is aimed at developers, returning the search results themselves, not conversational answers.

The search API will be open to the public in September 2025, selling the web index behind the answering engine to external applications, covering hundreds of billions of pages, with a pay-per-use fee of about $5 per thousand queries, excluding large model tokens. Internal evaluations at that time showed a median latency of 358 milliseconds, with p95 below 800 milliseconds, compared to Exa's median of about 1375 milliseconds, Brave's about 513 milliseconds, and SERP scraping represented by Tavily at about 1342 milliseconds. Daily query volume is approximately 200 million. Fast search reduces p95 from below 800 milliseconds to 230 milliseconds, targeting every millisecond in multi-turn retrieval by intelligent agents that contributes to the first token time.

Two weeks ago, Perplexity announced Cobbledb: a key-value hot storage written in about 40,000 lines of Rust, replacing DynamoDB, with median batch read latency dropping from 31.4 milliseconds to 5.60 milliseconds, a reduction of about 82%, and p99 dropping from 123 milliseconds to 24.2 milliseconds, claiming storage layer costs could decrease by more than 20%, while still using RocksDB underneath. Photon and Cobbledb are both self-developed service layers, one managing retrieval and sorting, the other managing hot reads. In the documentation, answer interfaces like Sonar have already divided search_type into fast and pro, with simple facts taking the fast path and complex research going through pro, charging based on trigger types.

The product positioning is to directly hand over indexing, hybrid retrieval, and multi-segment sorting to RAG and intelligent agents, rather than adding another layer of generation. The interface supports domain and language filtering, time windows, and a maximum of five queries per single request. After Microsoft shut down the Bing Search API, alternatives for developers include Brave, Exa, and various SERP proxies. Perplexity differentiates itself by using its own index and fine-grained fragment scoring, rather than scraping others' result pages.

Mechanically, it sells to application developers who want to embed web retrieval into their own model loops, while selling higher-latency third-party retrieval and SERP scraping. The event-driven approach is to mark internal latency optimizations externally as tiers in the API product line. Funding flows from per-query retrieval fees to self-developed Rust services and index updates; benefiting are applications that can write 230 milliseconds into intelligent agent orchestration and Perplexity's developer revenue, while the median remains above 500 milliseconds for the search API. Hundreds of intelligent agents are building infrastructure, shifting human effort from stacking features to stacking latency percentiles.

Source: Public Information