The fact that it provides those relevant links is what allows it to replace Google for a lot of purposes.
For example if I’m asking about whether a feature exists in some library, the AI says yes it does and links to a forum where someone is asking the same question I did, but no one answered (this has happened multiple times).
But when I want to actually search for content on the web for, say, product research or opinions on a topic, Perplexity is so much better than either Gemini or google search AI. It lists reference links for each block of assertions that are EASILY clicked on (unlike Gemini or search AI, where the references are just harder to click on for some reason, not the least of which is that they OPEN IN THE SAME TAB where Perplexity always opens on a new tab). This is often a reddit specific search as I want people's opinions on something.
Perplexity's UI for search specifically is the main thing it does just so much better than google's offering is the one thing going for it. I think there is some irony there.
Full disclosure, I don't use Anthropic or OpenAI, so this may not be the case for those products.
Im also someone who refuses to pay for it, so maybe the paid versions do better. who knows.
Running these things is expensive, and they're just not serving the same experience to non-paying users.
One could argue this is a bad idea on their part, letting people get a bad taste of an inferior product. And I wouldn't disagree, but I don't know what a sustainable alternative approach is.
Same issue with Gemini. Intuitively I'd also assume it's trivial to fix but perhaps there's more going on than we think. Perhaps validating every part of a response is a big overhead both financially and might even throw off the model and make it less accurate in other ways.