Perplexity Sonar dominates new Search Arena evaluation

LM Arena’s Search Arena leaderboard, based on more than 10,000 human preference votes on current and complex search queries collected from March 18 to April 13, 2025, ranked Perplexity’s Sonar-Reasoning-Pro-High statistically tied for first with Google’s Gemini-2.5-Pro-Grounding, scoring 1136 versus 1142, while winning 53% of direct comparisons. Perplexity reports that its Sonar models occupied the top four positions and outperformed Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Grounding and OpenAI web-search models, with reasoning-enabled variants placing especially highly. The evaluation found that longer answers, more citations, and citations from community web sources correlated with user preference, while experiments controlling for citations suggested that search depth was an important factor in rankings. Sonar models reportedly cited two to three times as many sources as comparable Gemini systems, and Perplexity presents the results as evidence of strong accuracy, source attribution, and response quality for its Pro and API users, alongside an announcement of an April 24 API overview by co-founder and CTO Denis Yarats.

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