Perplexity Cuts Agent API Research Costs and Adds Ultra Effort

Perplexity announced on November 5, 2026 that every Agent API effort level now costs less per query, and reported higher or unchanged research quality across the presets. Medium improved from 55% to 77% on BrowseComp and DSQA while its cost fell almost 90%, and a new ultra level is available for broad research. Effort levels package model choice, research-step and tool-call limits, search behavior and available tools into named presets.

They let developers select a balance of cost, speed and research depth without configuring each component separately. A request such as effort="fast" receives the revised setup automatically. At xhigh, Perplexity says the WANDR score held at 76.5% while the configuration ran at about 25% of its August 2026 cost. That level is intended for open-ended agentic work, including executing code in a sandbox, sustaining long tool-use loops and gathering evidence across many sources.

The WANDR paper describes a 500-task evaluation set built around realistic data-collection work. Agents must discover qualifying entities and return records whose sources and excerpts can be checked independently. Task-specific judges retrieve the cited pages again and…