Perplexity MCP

Research with cited answers, and see which brands AI search recommends in your category

The Perplexity MCP is Perplexity's official server. It gives Claude web search, written answers with sources, reasoning and a deep research mode, all through the Perplexity API.
For marketers it's also the quickest way to see what an AI answer engine says about your category: who it recommends, which sources it cites and whether you're in them. For finding companies and pages, Exa is the better search tool; for reading whole sites, use Firecrawl.

Watch out

  • It needs a Perplexity API key with credits, separate from a Perplexity Pro subscription.
  • Deep research calls cost more and can take minutes. Raise PERPLEXITY_TIMEOUT_MS locally if they time out.
  • Keep your API key out of shared project configs.

Install

Get an API key in the Perplexity API settings, then:
Terminal

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claude mcp add --transport http perplexity https://api.perplexity.ai/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"
To run it locally: claude mcp add perplexity --env PERPLEXITY_API_KEY="your_key_here" -- npx -y @perplexity-ai/mcp-server. The same npx command works in Codex and Cursor. Claude Code users can also install it as a plugin with /plugin marketplace add perplexityai/modelcontextprotocol.
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