A similar thing happened when I asked Perplexity for driving directions to a work meeting. Google would have given me turn-by-turn directions from my house, thanks to its integration with Google Maps. But Perplexity doesn’t know where I live, so the best it could offer me was a link to MapQuest.

Location data is just one of the many advantages Google has over Perplexity. Size is another; Perplexity, which has just 41 employees and is based out of a shared working space in San Francisco, has 10 million monthly active users, an impressive number for a young startup but a speck compared with Google’s billions.