Perplexity Labs: The Next-Generation AI Tool That Actually Works
Automate your SEO and digital marketing processes with competitor analysis, content optimization, and reporting through next-generation AI.
The rapid changes in the technology world continue to expand AI’s place in our daily lives. Smart Personal Assistants (IPAs) that we encounter on smartphones, smart home systems, and e-commerce sites have become an inseparable part of our lives. These assistants are defined as AI-powered software that can provide users with accurate and fast answers, act proactively, and learn from experiences.
Today, the vast majority of professionals are turning to AI tools to improve their performance and automate routine tasks. According to research by Michael Page, 65% of professionals in European countries, including Turkey, utilise these tools for performance improvement, while 49% use them to automate routine tasks.
For business professionals, marketers, and sales specialists who struggle with intense data flow and complex projects, productivity tools like Perplexity Labs offer a valuable solution. This platform brings together many capabilities from comprehensive research to coding, from design to analysis under one roof, allowing users to implement their projects faster and more efficiently.
What Makes Perplexity Labs Different from Everything Else
Perplexity Labs is an AI productivity tool developed by Perplexity AI that gives users the feeling of having an entire team. Unlike traditional AI chatbots, Labs operates on the principle of working not as “an extra brain” but as “an extra pair of hands.”
This tool is designed as an AI-powered workspace that can handle complex projects from start to finish and create detailed reports, financial dashboards, and even applications within minutes. Perplexity Labs can potentially reduce work that could take business professionals days to minutes.
The most striking feature of Labs is its combination of advanced capabilities, such as deep web browsing, code execution, instant design capabilities, and creating graphics and images on a single platform. The system remains transparent while working, giving users the opportunity to pause, skip, or improve each sub-task. This way, users can have full control over the process instead of waiting for a one-time response.
All created assets — from CSV-supported graphics to HTML/CSS packages — fall into the “Assets” panel and become ready for instant download or editing.
Why This Matters for SEO Professionals (And Why I’m Excited)
Here’s the truth: I’ve spent fifteen years watching SEO professionals burn out from repetitive tasks. Keyword research, competitor analysis, and report generation — these should be starting points, not endpoints.
Perplexity Labs changes the game because it doesn’t just research. It executes.
Think about it: When was the last time you had a tool that could analyse your competitor’s content strategy, identify gaps, create optimised content suggestions, AND generate a presentation-ready report with interactive charts?
Never? That’s what I thought.
The Mechanics: How Labs Work
Perplexity Labs is currently accessible only to Pro users. Getting started is quite simple: just click the light bulb icon in the chat box on Perplexity’s website and write a prompt stating what you want to be done. The system researches and creates code within a few minutes. After the process is completed, you can interact with the created mini application through the “Application” option in the top panel.
This process usually completes faster than 9 minutes, but some complex tasks can take up to 20 minutes. Labs’ working principle is to bring together multiple agents: performing different operations such as browsing the web, researching PDFs, and writing code to perform specific tasks with a single prompt.
This “agentic” element is the fundamental difference that separates Perplexity Labs from traditional search engines and chatbots like ChatGPT. Labs not only provides information but also creates content, produces visuals, and presents them as structured reports, charts, and interactive dashboards.
Four Game-Changing Applications for SEO Professionals
1. Competitor Analysis and Trend Monitoring
In the constantly changing nature of digital marketing, closely monitoring trends and competitor strategies is critically important. Perplexity Labs quickly compiles and analyses current SEO and digital marketing trends from numerous sources, allowing you to understand your competitors’ content strategies and ranking factors.
Data-Driven Trend Detection: AI’s biggest advantage in trend analysis is its ability to process large datasets much faster than traditional methods. Perplexity Labs allows you to gain a broad perspective by bringing together information from different data sources.
Competitor Content Strategies: Labs automates your routine research work by scanning competitor sites or news sources at specific intervals and extracting current content summaries. This way, you can quickly analyse what topics your competitors are producing content on, which keywords they’re targeting, and the performance of their content.
Visualised Data: Labs can present complex data in the form of interactive graphs and dashboards. For example, by creating a “Global Economic Indicator Tracking Dashboard,” you can monitor economic indicators in a particular sector and quickly grasp macroeconomic trends that could affect your SEO strategy.
2. Content Research and Optimisation
Content marketing forms the foundation of digital marketing strategies. Perplexity Labs plays an important role in this process by accelerating and optimising content production.
Keyword Research and Content Ideas: Labs can collect information from different sources for keyword research and creating SEO-compatible texts, and offer original content suggestions. It performs in-depth analysis on user search terms and trends using machine learning and data analysis techniques.
SEO-Compatible Text Creation: Determined keywords help content creators create more effective titles and texts. Thanks to AI-powered automatic content optimisation, Labs contributes to making content SEO-compatible.
Personalised Content Production: AI can analyse user behaviours and preferences to offer suggestions suitable for each user’s needs. This way, personalised content increases users’ interaction with the brand and creates loyalty.
Content Production Efficiency: AI enables much faster and more efficient content creation compared to traditional methods in the content production process. Labs save time in operations such as text writing and visual/video editing, allowing agencies to produce more content.
3. Automated Reporting and Visualisation
Reports presented to clients can be a time-consuming task for SEO agencies. Perplexity Labs significantly simplifies this process.
Comprehensive Report and Dashboard Creation: With Perplexity Labs, you can create SEO performance reports, graphs, and dashboards and easily present these reports to clients. Labs can transform raw data (for example, a sales CSV file) into interactive graphs and web-based dashboards.
Advanced Visualisations: Labs presents analyses and findings in a visually appealing way. It can create market share visualisations from complex financial data or market analyses.
Interactive Application Capability: One of the Labs’ most striking features is its ability to create interactive mini-applications and dashboards. By creating applications like “Global Economic Indicator Tracking Dashboard” or “AI Adaptation Dashboard,” you can allow users to dynamically explore data by selecting different data points.
4. Workflow Automation and Micro-Audience Marketing
Perplexity Labs offers groundbreaking capabilities not only in individual tasks but also in automating entire workflows and focusing on micro-audiences, which is the future of digital marketing.
Comprehensive Workflow Automation: Labs is an AI productivity agent that can manage complex projects from start to finish. It combines deep web browsing, code execution, instant design, and visual creation capabilities to automate workflows.
Micro-Audience Marketing: The future of digital marketing is shifting from broad audiences like “ideal customer profile” (ICP) to much more specific “micro-audience” targeted personalised marketing. Perplexity Labs stands out as an invaluable tool in implementing this strategy.
Micro-Audience Detection: Labs can take your basic customer profile and divide it into smaller, targeted segments called “micro-audience cards.” It can search external sources like LinkedIn job postings for specific signals, such as KPIs or technology stacks that companies want to target.
The Competitive Landscape (And Why Labs Win)
Perplexity Labs is a concrete reflection of rapid developments in the AI field. While traditional chatbots usually offer text-based responses, Labs provides much more dynamic and visual outputs. Compared to ChatGPT, it’s observed that Labs offers more in-depth reports with visuals in creative tasks such as scenario writing and storyboard creation.
While Labs has similar capabilities to other AI search engines and “super agents” like Manis and GenSpark, Perplexity positions its niche as a comprehensive productivity agent that combines research, coding, and design in a single intuitive interface.
However, it’s acknowledged that Labs isn’t perfect either. Some users may experience problems such as data filtering issues in complex data analysis tasks or shifts in the alignment of statistical tables. Additionally, some features (such as not being able to download slide shows as PPT) need further development.
Future Potential and Why This Matters Now
Research on intelligent personal assistants provides a data-driven, comprehensive perspective on the development of these technologies over time and the current state of the sector, with future trends. The proliferation of new technologies and increasing demand for smart devices shows that smart home technologies and intelligent personal assistants have promising and great potential in the future.
Autonomous AI agents like Perplexity Labs are becoming increasingly useful in experts’ daily work in many areas, from marketing to project management and analytical tasks. For companies, this means the opportunity to save time, reduce costs, and implement projects faster.
My Take After 15 Years in SEO
Here’s what I’ve learned: The tools don’t make the strategist, but the right tools can multiply a strategist’s impact exponentially.
Perplexity Labs isn’t just another AI tool. It’s a force multiplier for everything we do as SEO professionals. The competitive advantage won’t come from having access to it — everyone will have that eventually. The advantage will come from understanding how to integrate it into your strategic thinking.
The future belongs to SEO professionals who can think strategically while leveraging AI tactically. Labs gives us the tactical execution speed we’ve been missing.
Conclusion: The New Playbook
Perplexity Labs stands out as a transformative tool for business professionals and especially SEO and digital marketing agencies by combining AI’s research, coding, and design capabilities on a single platform. With the efficiency it provides in simplifying complex tasks, automating routine workflows, and developing data-driven strategies, this next-generation AI tool has the potential to become an indispensable assistant for those who want to gain a competitive advantage in the digital marketing world.
Perplexity Labs goes beyond the traditional deep research mode and offers SEO agencies a wide range of applications. This integrated approach, ranging from competitor analysis and trend monitoring to content research and optimisation, from automated reporting and visualisation to micro-audience marketing, enables agencies to handle their work faster with less effort and resources.
AI-powered solutions like these make digital marketing strategies more efficient, allowing brands to communicate more effectively with their target audiences. The capabilities offered by Perplexity Labs not only facilitate existing tasks but also pave the way for developing new playbooks by creating personalised and scalable campaigns for micro-audiences in digital marketing.
Mert Erkal is the founder of Stradiji, which has been providing consultancy services on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEO Friendly Content Production and Optimization, and Conversion Optimization since 2009. SEO consultancy of enterprise companies is Mert's unique expertise. He has been sharing and commenting on weekly critical developments from the SEO world for about three years with his newsletter "SEOs Diners Club." With the advantage of remote working, he continues to provide SEO consultancy to English-speaking countries, especially the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Follow on LinkedIn