Perplexity

You know how to search with Perplexity. Now learn how to research with it.

Most Perplexity guides stop where the real work begins. They show you how to type a question and read the citations. They do not show you how to design queries that survive contact with hard problems, how to build research systems your team can actually run, or how to drive Perplexity programmatically through the Sonar API.

This book does.

Perplexity: The Advanced Research Playbook is the power-user follow-up to Perplexity: The Research Playbook. It is written for the analyst, consultant, journalist, academic, and operator who has already moved past the "wow, this is cool" stage and into the "how do I make this a reliable part of how I work" stage. Twenty-two chapters and four appendices push you from competent searcher to systematic researcher.

What's inside:

• Query architecture, not just queries. Constraint stacking, scope and format control, negative constraints, multi-part queries, and the structural patterns that consistently produce great answers from Pro Search and Deep Research.
• Master every Focus mode. Academic, Finance, Social, and the rest - when each one excels, how to chain them across multi-stage research, and how to build custom research methodologies from Focus mode sequences.
• Deep Research, done right. Crafting research briefs that produce exceptional reports, scoping for depth versus breadth, citation verification workflows, and a real-world walkthrough of a competitive intelligence report from prompt to deliverable.
• Spaces as research systems. Architecture, governance, enterprise file sync (Google Drive, SharePoint), and how to design Spaces that stop being search history and start being shared infrastructure.
• The Perplexity API for builders. When to leave the web interface behind, the Sonar model family (sonar, sonar-pro, sonar-reasoning, sonar-deep-research), structured output, citation handling, cost management, and a complete automated market-monitoring system you can adapt.
• Domain playbooks. Competitive and market intelligence, academic and scientific literature review, content creation and fact-checking pipelines - each with a worked example end to end.
• Ecosystem mastery. Comet Browser power workflows, Model Council and multi-model strategies, Perplexity Computer for agentic research, and the four research frameworks (systematic review, competitive intelligence, due diligence, trend analysis) that handle most professional work.
• 50 power-researcher query patterns, workflow templates, and a full API quick reference in the appendices.

If you have ever run a Deep Research query, gotten a forty-page report, and thought "I bet I could make this even better" - you are exactly who this book is for.

Includes coverage of Sonar 2026, Pro Search, Deep Research, Spaces, Comet Browser, Perplexity Computer, Model Council, and every 2026 enterprise feature.