Not OP but it used to be that if you wanted an LLM that would cite its sources - Perplexity was one of the only games in town that did a really good job combining an LLM with an active search engine.

It was also much better for posing questions that required the most up-to-date knowledge.

It starts with a search and reasoning from there. Cites the sources in the middle of the sentences so you can just click and verify, see the whole context.

It blows every "model only" service because it's 100x more accurate.

I use it instead of Google for every search now.

Search is the most if not only useful application of LLMs. In this space there is also Phind. It seems I use Perplexity as often as Google nowadays.