Write perfect Perplexity Prompts

Ponder
2 min readMay 30, 2023

I began using Perplexity a couple of weeks ago, and honestly fell in love with its combination of simplicity + low hallucination count, in contrast to other AI models such as ChatGPT with Bing search.

However, prompts still prove to be extremely important to Perplexity, so here are my findings on how to ask the perfect question.

Let's try a case study

What if I was trying to find the best restaurants in Chicago I might ask something like “best restaurants in Chicago” but what you get is not exactly what you might expect. Take a look

Instead of telling us the restaurants it provides us a list of resources to find out for ourself, which defeats the purpose of the AI in the first place. So what can we change about it?

Let's try to clarify that we want a list of restaurants?

While this is an improvement it still just gives us a large list of names which is not what we want. So what would be the perfect prompt? Here it is:

Now here we can see that it not only chose the restaurants it considered best, but also justified its answer with details of the restaurant!

Key Takeaways

  • Be Specific (if you want it in the form of a list, clarify that)
  • Clarify Depth (eg, w details, w explanation, w justification)
  • Shorten Scope (reduce empty text my declaring a integer value for the search query)

I hope you enjoyed this short article explaining how to properly structure your prompts for Perplexity to get better responses!

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