Perplexity: Sonar Deep Research
Perplexity Sonar Deep Research has no benchmark data available, limiting confidence in its general capability; it may be useful for deep web research workflows but cannot be reliably assessed against other models at this time.
Assessment date: March 12, 2026
Our methodology takes into account a range of factors including pricing, functionality, capabilities, benchmark performance, and real-world applicability. Rankings are reviewed and updated regularly as new models are released. Issues with our rankings? Contact us
Sonar Deep Research is a research-focused model designed for multi-step retrieval, synthesis, and reasoning across complex topics. It autonomously searches, reads, and evaluates sources, refining its approach as it gathers information. This enables comprehensive report generation across domains like finance, technology, health, and current events. Notes on Pricing (Source) - Input tokens comprise of Prompt tokens (user prompt) + Citation tokens (these are processed tokens from running searches)
- Deep Research runs multiple searches to conduct exhaustive research. Searches are priced at $5/1000 searches. A request that does 30 searches will cost $0.15 in this step.
- Reasoning is a distinct step in Deep Research since it does extensive automated reasoning through all the material it gathers during its research phase. Reasoning tokens here are a bit different than the CoTs in the answer - these are tokens that we use to reason through the research material prior to generating the outputs via the CoTs. Reasoning tokens are priced at $3/1M tokens
Architecture
| Modality | Text → Text |
| Tokenizer | Other |
| Instruct Type | deepseek-r1 |
Model Information
Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $2.00 | $0.002000 |
| Output | $8.00 | $0.008000 |
Live Performance
Live endpoint metrics — refreshed every 30 minutes.
External Resources
Data sourced from OpenRouter API, Artificial Analysis and Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Scores are editorially curated by our team.
Last updated: March 13, 2026 7:52 pm