Perplexity is Google for the AI era, dressed in researcher-black. Founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas and a team of ex-Google and ex-Meta AI researchers in San Francisco, the product pairs a deep blue-black interface with a single electric teal accent, monospace citation markers, and the information density of an academic paper.

The result is a "library at midnight" aesthetic — serious, citation-rich, and deliberately anti-playful. Where traditional search engines scatter color across ads and widgets, Perplexity strips everything back to dark surfaces, off-white text, and teal hyperlinks that say "this fact has a source." It is how serious people search now.