Perplexity MCP

What it does

Claude’s training data has a cutoff, so questions that require fresh information — recent news, just-shipped docs, latest releases — can’t be answered from memory alone. The usual workaround is to switch to a browser, run a search, and paste results back. Perplexity MCP collapses that loop: Claude calls the search directly through MCP tools and gets answers grounded in real-time web data.

Because Perplexity’s Sonar models synthesize answers from search results rather than returning raw pages, Claude doesn’t have to re-read full result pages itself.

Key features — four tools

• perplexity_search — direct web search

  Returns ranked Perplexity Search API results unmodified. Use when you want the raw result set rather than a synthesized answer.

• perplexity_ask — conversational AI with real-time web search

  The most common entry point. Runs on sonar-pro and returns a synthesized answer over current web data in a single call.

• perplexity_research — deep research

  Runs on sonar-deep-research and produces longer-form research that combines multiple sources. Better suited for topic-wide questions than one-shot queries.

• perplexity_reason — advanced reasoning

  Runs on sonar-reasoning-pro and adds an explicit reasoning step on top of search results.

Both perplexity_research and perplexity_reason accept a strip_thinking boolean to drop thinking tags from output and save tokens.

Installation

Claude Code (recommended) — one-liner that registers and installs the server.

claude mcp add perplexity \
  --env PERPLEXITY_API_KEY="your_key_here" \
  -- npx -y @perplexity-ai/mcp-server

Codex — same pattern.

codex mcp add perplexity \
  --env PERPLEXITY_API_KEY="your_key_here" \
  -- npx -y @perplexity-ai/mcp-server

Cursor · Claude Desktop · Kiro · Windsurf · VS Code — add the server to the client’s mcpServers JSON config (file location varies per client).

Docker · HTTP server — for shared or cloud deployments. Either docker build and docker run -p 8080:8080 -e PERPLEXITY_API_KEY=..., or run the HTTP mode directly with npm install && npm run build && npm run start:http.

Environment variables

Variable	Required	Default	Purpose
PERPLEXITY_API_KEY	✅	—	API key. Generate at https://www.perplexity.ai/account/api/group
PERPLEXITY_TIMEOUT_MS		5 minutes	API call timeout
PERPLEXITY_BASE_URL		https://api.perplexity.ai	Custom endpoint
PERPLEXITY_LOG_LEVEL		ERROR	One of DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR
PERPLEXITY_PROXY / HTTPS_PROXY / HTTP_PROXY		—	Corporate proxy. Format: https://[username:password@]host:port

HTTP server deployment also reads: PORT (default 8080), BIND_ADDRESS (default 0.0.0.0), and ALLOWED_ORIGINS.

Notes

• Officially operated by Perplexity — maintained in the github.com/perplexityai org, distinct from community wrappers.
• API usage is billed separately by Perplexity — Anthropic charges for Claude tokens, Perplexity charges for API calls. Track usage on each platform separately if cost monitoring matters.
• Proxy support — set PERPLEXITY_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY, or HTTP_PROXY; any of the three is recognized.
• Use strip_thinking to save tokens — the research and reason tools include thinking tags in output by default. When only the final answer is needed, enable the option to reduce token usage.
• MIT licensed — free for commercial and personal use.