Welcome to the post-Google Search Age

By Micah Gaudet •
Government AI

If you skimmed the tech pages this month, you probably caught the headlines about Perplexity AI. The search-chat hybrid quietly introduced Perplexity Labs, a workspace where a single prompt can blossom into a spreadsheet, an interactive dashboard, or even a polished report—each step documented with live citations. Early reviewers at TechCrunch call it a shift from "answer engine" to "on-demand analyst."

Why does that matter for city halls and county offices? Reliable sourcing. Labs still rests on the foundation that set Perplexity apart in the first place: every fact is footnoted in real time. Add the new project workflow and you get something closer to a junior policy aide than a chatbot.

A Quick Tour in Plain Language

Perplexity's free tier lets you fire off focused searches—academic journals, Reddit threads, YouTube tutorials, all in one sweep. Upgrade to the twenty-dollar Pro plan and Labs unlocks. In practice, you can drop a question like "Map last decade's storm-water grant winners and generate a gap analysis for my town" and watch the tool gather statutes, scrape agency press releases, assemble a table in Sheets, and sketch a chart. Each artifact arrives with links intact, saving you the chase from summary back to source.

Field Test: Writing a Procurement Policy While You Wait for Coffee

I asked Labs to "create a step-by-step city procurement policy."

First pass: Nine clean sections—objectives, thresholds, ethical standards—backed by guidance from the New York State Comptroller.

Local flavor: Adding "Make it Colorado-specific for a town of 50k" swapped in Durango's municipal code, Boulder's bidding handbook, and state purchasing statutes.

Audit trail: Every sub-heading carried a live reference link, ready for the records division.

Total runtime: ~30 seconds. Rewrite time: minimal.

Strategic Upsides You Can Exploit Today

  • Transparency from the first draft. Cited answers simplify public-records requests.
  • Extra capacity without overtime. Leave the grinding data pull to AI and reserve staff hours for judgment calls.
  • Rapid prototyping. Policy memo in the morning, dashboard in the afternoon, pilot tomorrow.
  • Commerce on the horizon. A fresh partnership with PayPal hints at in-chat permit payments and fee processing.

The traffic numbers remind us that AI chatbots are still a rounding error next to Google—but Perplexity's growth curve suggests the gap is closing fast.

Ready to Kick the Tires?

  • Try the free tier today. Focus search alone can streamline the research you already do.
  • Pilot Labs for a week. The Pro plan is month-to-month—low risk for a quick test.
  • Level up with structured guidance. If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of everything above (plus a few tricks we couldn't fit here), enroll in my Intro to Perplexity course. It's a concise, practitioner-oriented primer built for local-government pros. → civicinnovation.ai/courses/perplexity.