Perplexity launches Fast Search in Search API
The new tier runs on the custom Rust engine Photon, returning 95% of results within 230 ms and cutting agent task costs by 68%.
- Median latency is 160 ms by Perplexity's benchmarks.
- Fast Search scores 0.24 points lower on relevance and 3 percentage points lower on answer availability on internal long-tail tests compared to the default preset.
- Photon replaces Perplexity's previous open-source retrieval engine across the entire service, lowering internal p99 response times from 800 ms to 65 ms.
- Photon uses 20% fewer serving machines, stores 2.5x as much data per document, and isolates index builds from live query servers.
Developers building AI agent workflows can reduce search latency and query costs with minor trade-offs in retrieval quality.
