After Bharti Airtel announced that it is giving away a free one-year Perplexity Pro subscription to eligible users in India, the app beat ChatGPT to become the number one free app on iOS. Unlike traditional AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, Perplexity is a web search engine that uses AI to search for information on the internet and present it in an easy-to-understand format.
The company says that in order to generate accurate responses, it uses different large language models like GPT-4.1, Claude 4.0 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro. If you have recently claimed the free one-year Perplexity Pro subscription, here are five features that you should try right now.
Pro search
Compared to the free version of Perplexity, Pro users not only get more searchers per day, but also get access to the company’s Pro Search feature. The functionality allows Perplexity Pro subscribers to make use of advanced AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Claude 4.0 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro. In case you don’t like the outputs generated by these models, you can switch to Sonar, a large language model developed by Perplexity itself.
Reasoning models
For users who want to ask complex analytical questions, the Pro subscription includes OpenAI’s o3, Claude 4.0 Sonnet, xAI’s Grok 4, and a fine-tuned uncensored version of DeepSeek R1, which the company says is hosted in the United States. If you want AI to research on a topic, Perplexity says it automatically selects an “optimal combination of models” which can generate detailed reports.
Labs
Perplexity Pro subscribers also get access to Labs, an AI-powered feature that helps users make spreadsheets, dashboards and web apps in a few minutes. In a blog post, Perplexity said Labs can do all of the aforementioned things by performing 10 minutes or more of “self-supervised work” using a wide range of tools like code execution, image creation and code execution.
If you are into coding, Labs can also help you write and execute code to do tasks like structuring data, creating charts, text documents and spreadsheets.
File and analysis
Like ChatGPT and Gemini, Perplexity Pro users can also upload files like PDF, CSV, audio, video and images for analysis. The feature is powered by large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 Omni and Claude 4.0 Sonnet, which means it will have the same capabilities as Claude and ChatGPT.
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Image Generation
Like ChatGPT and Gemini premium subscribers, Perplexity Pro members can also generate and edit images using text prompts. Perplexity says users should “try to be as specific as possible” with their instructions, and the app will automatically generate the image without the user having to press any button after prompting.
Perplexity’s default image generation model is GPT Image 1, but the company says they will be adding more models as they become available. In case you don’t like the output, simply set your model preference from the settings menu. Currently available options include Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental, FLUX.1 and DALL-E 3.
And while there is no edit option, you can ask Perplexity to regenerate the image. And while there are no limitations on how many times Pro users can regenerate an image, Pro subscribers are limited to 150 images per month using GPT Image 1.
