An MCP server that connects to Perplexity's Sonar API, enabling real-time web-wide research in conversational AI.
If you want an AI assistant working directly with Perplexity, the perplexity mcp server is the bridge. An MCP server that connects to Perplexity's Sonar API, enabling real-time web-wide research in conversational AI.
The official MCP server implementation for the Perplexity API Platform, providing AI assistants with real-time web search, reasoning, and research capabilities through the Agent API and the Search API.
Once connected, the assistant can call this tool directly:
Codex — The Codex tool exposed by this serverThe server is distributed via npm as @perplexity-ai/mcp-server, so most clients can run it without a manual build step. Add it to your MCP client's configuration and restart the client to pick it up — the copy-paste configs for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are on this page.
Before the server will start you need to supply 4 environment variables: PERPLEXITY_API_KEY, PERPLEXITY_PROXY, YOUR_API_KEY, PERPLEXITY_BASE_URL. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than committing them.
Developer-tool servers are usually the first ones people connect, because they turn "help me with this code" into an assistant that can actually read the repo and act on it. Perplexity sits in that group, and the shape of its toolset — Codex — tells you what it is really for. Worth comparing against the other developer tools servers in this directory before you commit to one, since several overlap in scope but differ sharply in setup cost and permissions.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Codex | The Codex tool exposed by this server. |
{
"mcpServers": {
"modelcontextprotocol": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@perplexity-ai/mcp-server"],
"env": {
"PERPLEXITY_API_KEY": "your-value",
"PERPLEXITY_PROXY": "your-value",
"YOUR_API_KEY": "your-value",
"PERPLEXITY_BASE_URL": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| PERPLEXITY_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
| PERPLEXITY_PROXY | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
| YOUR_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
| PERPLEXITY_BASE_URL | Endpoint or connection string the server talks to. | Yes |
The simplest web tool that matters — fetch any URL and get model-ready markdown back.
Industrial-strength web extraction — render, scrape, crawl and search entire sites into clean markdown.
Puppeteer-powered browser control that drives pages from the accessibility tree instead of pixels.
Search built for AI, not humans — semantic web search that returns model-ready content, plus code context.
Answers, not links — delegate questions to Perplexity's search-grounded models and get cited responses back.
Put 6,000+ pre-built scrapers at your assistant's fingertips through one MCP endpoint.