Last updated August 2026
On July 17, 2026, Perplexity’s help center confirmed the price and shape of its top enterprise tier: Enterprise Max at $325 per seat per month, sitting above Enterprise Pro at $40 per seat per month. The confirmation landed in Perplexity’s own Enterprise Pricing and Billing FAQ, the page a procurement team reads right before it signs.
The headline feature at that price is Model Council. Point it at one question, and it runs that question across several frontier models at once, then hands back a single screen that shows where the models agree and where they split. For an answer engine optimization (AEO) team, that is not a research toy. It is the same side-by-side, multi-model check that dedicated AEO software already sells as a core feature.
What Perplexity actually confirmed on July 17, 2026
Perplexity’s Enterprise FAQ lays out two tiers, and organizations can mix both across one team on one invoice. Here is how they compare, sourced from Perplexity’s own pricing FAQ and its Enterprise Max product page:
| Capability | Enterprise Pro | Enterprise Max |
|---|---|---|
| Price per seat | $40/month ($400/year) | $325/month ($3,250/year) |
| Computer credits per seat, monthly | 500 | 15,000 (30 times Pro) |
| Model Council access | Not included | Included |
| SCIM provisioning and audit logs | Requires a seat-count minimum | Org-wide with no seat minimum, once one Max seat exists |
| Advanced model access | Standard model set | Adds Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol |
| Deep Research and Create rate limits | Standard | Enhanced |
| Video generation | Not included | 15 videos/month |
| Mixed Pro and Max seats in one org | Yes | Yes |
Pricing and features accurate as of Sept. 3, 2026, sourced from Perplexity’s Enterprise Pricing and Billing FAQ (updated July 22, 2026) and its Enterprise Max product page (updated Aug. 12, 2026). Confirm current terms directly with Perplexity before you budget against these figures, since enterprise tiers change.
Two details matter beyond the headline price. The 30-times jump in Computer credits signals a tier built for heavy, repeated queries, not occasional lookups. And tying SCIM and audit logs to seat count, unless a Max seat is present, makes Enterprise Max the tier that unlocks clean single sign-on and compliance logging for the whole org, not just one user.
What Model Council actually does
Perplexity built Model Council to stop people from manually switching between models to check an answer. Select it, and your query runs across several frontier models at once, drawing on models such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini. A synthesizer model then reviews every output and returns one answer that shows where the models converge and where they disagree.
The business reason it exists is model inconsistency: a model strong at coding can be weak at research, and one tuned for creative work can miss a fact another model catches. Model Council is Perplexity’s answer to “which model do I trust for this.”
For a procurement team evaluating vendors, or an analyst checking how AI engines describe a brand, that same mechanic answers a different question: does this brand show up consistently, or only when one particular model happens to know about it?
One prompt, five answer engines: why the divergence matters
Model Council checks several models inside Perplexity. AEO teams need to check something broader: how a brand’s citation rate holds up across the major answer engines a real buyer actually opens. This site tracks five: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
Run the same prompt across all five, and the pattern usually is not uniform. Here is an illustrative example of what that divergence looks like for one brand and one prompt:
| Answer engine | What it draws on | Illustrative outcome |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Live browsing plus training data | Cited |
| Perplexity | Real-time retrieval, checked across models via Model Council | Cited by two of three models, absent from one |
| Google AI Overviews | Top-ranking pages and schema markup | Not cited |
| Gemini | Google’s knowledge graph and search index | Cited |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing’s index | Not cited |
Three engines out of five is not a passing grade. It is the normal outcome for a brand with no dedicated AEO program, and it is exactly the pattern a procurement team now sees for itself the moment they run a query through Model Council. See citations are the new rankings for how to read that pattern once you have it, and the AEO glossary for the terms in the table above.
What this means for competitive-intel and brand-monitoring teams
Four things to act on now:
- Trial Model Council as a free spot check, not a monitoring plan. Run your top five brand prompts through it this quarter and treat the results as a snapshot, not a system.
- Read the $325 price as a market signal. Perplexity just told procurement that enterprise-grade, multi-model AI access is worth a premium tier, which makes it easier to justify a line item for dedicated AEO software in the same budget conversation.
- Expect “which model do we trust” to become a standing vendor-review question. Model Council gives buyers language for a question they were already half-asking. Answer it with your own citation data, not a guess.
- Map what Model Council covers against what your program needs. It checks a handful of models on demand. A real AEO program needs scheduled checks across five or more engines, named-competitor benchmarking, and an alert when a citation disappears.
Where dedicated AEO software still wins
Model Council is a genuine preview of multi-model comparison, but it stops at the demo. For ongoing coverage, the tools built for this differ by team size and governance need.
Profound and Scrunch AI fit the enterprise buyer this news is aimed at first. Profound tracks nine answer engines with citation source attribution built for executive reporting, a rollup a Model Council screenshot cannot produce on its own. Scrunch adds SOC 2 Type II certification and an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI-optimized content directly to crawlers, which matters once a security review enters the picture.
Temso is the easier all-in-one route for teams that want the same five-engine loop, plus the content fixes and FAQ schema that close a citation gap, in one flat subscription from $89 a month. It skips the enterprise governance layer Profound and Scrunch ship, but it covers monitoring and execution without a procurement cycle.
Otterly.AI fits lighter needs: a small team or a single analyst who wants prompt-level citation tracking without an enterprise contract, starting from $29 a month.
Full pricing and feature comparisons across the tools this site tracks are on the AEO tool ranking, and the scoring criteria behind it are on the methodology page. The buyer’s guide to AEO software walks through how to match a tool to your bottleneck; this news updates that guide’s pricing context as of August 2026, since a $325/seat enterprise anchor from Perplexity itself changes what “expensive” means in this category.
Run the check yourself
Before you budget for Model Council, Perplexity’s Enterprise Max, or a dedicated AEO platform, run one prompt through all five engines and see what comes back. The AEO tool ranking is the fastest way to compare which platform covers that check on a schedule, with the history and alerts a one-time demo cannot give you.