Perplexity Spaces Prompts

A Space is a persistent workspace that bundles an AI Profile (permanent context about who you are and what you want), uploaded Files (PDFs and CSVs the Space can quote), and a Threads list (the conversation history). A regular thread is one-off. A Space keeps the Profile and Files attached to every new thread you start inside it, so you stop pasting the same setup into every query. Spaces launched as Collections on May 16, 2024 and were renamed in October 2024.

No. Free users can create Spaces, but the Files cap is much tighter and the model picker is locked to Sonar. Pro lifts the Files cap (50 per Space, 25 MB each as of May 2026), unlocks the frontier model picker (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 4), and removes the daily Pro Search cap that Free hits quickly. If you actually use Spaces for research, Pro at $20 per month pays for itself in two days of work.

The AI Profile is a persistent system prompt scoped to the Space. It travels with every thread you start inside that Space. Put role, audience, output format defaults, and a citation rule in it. A profile like "answer as a securities analyst writing for institutional clients, cite SEC filings preferentially, never speculate beyond what the filing says" produces a different Space than the default. Keep the Profile under 200 words and stable; if you change it often, the Space loses its character.

Substantially. The default Web filter pulls open web pages, which is fast but noisy. Academic restricts the index to arXiv and Semantic Scholar, which produces better answers for peer-reviewed topics. Finance favors SEC EDGAR, official investor relations pages, and Yahoo Finance. Social pulls X and Reddit, useful for sentiment but unreliable for facts. Set the filter per query, not per Space. The same Space can run Web research on Monday and Academic on Tuesday.

Sonar is the default and is good enough for most research tasks because it is search-grounded by design. Switch to Claude Sonnet 4.5 for long-document reasoning over uploaded Files. Switch to GPT-5.4 or GPT-5.5 for general-purpose Q&A and code-adjacent reasoning. Switch to Gemini 2.5 Pro when the question needs the 1M-token context window. The picker is per query; you can mix models inside one thread and Perplexity remembers each turn's choice.

No. Files are capped at 50 per Space and 25 MB per file on Pro as of May 2026. For larger corpora, build a Perplexity Sonar API integration against your own retriever, or chunk the source material and upload only the most relevant 20 to 30 documents. The Space is not a vector database. It is a research assistant that quotes the documents you put in front of it.

Any thread inside a Space can be converted to a Page. Pages were introduced May 30, 2024 as the long-form, structured, shareable output of a research session. The conversion takes the thread's answers and reformats them into an article with headings, inline citations, and a clean URL. Pages get indexed by search engines and are commonly cited inside Bing AI Overviews. Use the Space to build the research, use the Page to ship the writeup.

Two common causes. First, when the user prompt directly contradicts the Profile ("answer briefly" overrides a Profile that says "write at length"). The user message wins. Second, when the Profile is too long and self-contradictory. Profiles over 300 words lose adherence. Cut it down to one role sentence, one audience sentence, one format rule, and one citation rule. The Space follows that consistently. Stack five contradicting rules and it picks whichever it can satisfy.

Mostly yes, with two limits. Citations are inline and clickable, which is the strongest citation behavior of any major answer engine. The limit is that Perplexity sometimes pulls a press-release-style source when a primary filing or paper exists, and the AI Profile is the right place to fix that. A Profile like "cite SEC filings directly when discussing public-company financials, never cite a press release if the underlying filing is available" reroutes the citation behavior the rest of the Space.

Yes, on Enterprise and on the new Pro Team plan. Shared Spaces let multiple users add Files and start threads under the same AI Profile, which is the closest Perplexity gets to a collaborative research workspace. Personal Pro Spaces stay solo. For ad-hoc shares, generating a Page from the relevant thread is the cleanest way to give a colleague the result of the work without granting Space access.

Pro Search uses the higher-quality search pipeline (multi-step retrieval, source filtering, reasoning) and has a daily cap that resets at midnight UTC. Standard search is unlimited but pulls fewer sources. If you keep hitting the cap, mix the two: use Pro Search for the hard query that needs reasoning, then Standard for the follow-up clarifications. Or upgrade to Perplexity Max if your Space is doing serial Pro Search every day.

Treating the Space like a chat thread and stuffing the entire research brief into the first message. The AI Profile already holds the persistent context. Files hold the documents. The user prompt should be the specific question of the moment. A first user typically writes a 400-word prompt that re-explains the role, the audience, and the format rules already in the Profile. Cut the prompt to the actual question and the Space performs noticeably better.