Web-grounded Q&A with citations

Scores as of 2026-09-14 (43 days old; Depot marks scores stale after 30 days). The pick is still Depot's current editorial pick; it has not been re-reviewed since. Prices below carry their own dates.

Depot Pick

Perplexity · 7.67/10 for this job (curated estimate, high confidence)

capability groundedness + dx; lock-in medium.

Runner-up

Exa · 8.30/10

Scores higher than the pick on: Capability fit, Price / performance, Latency / reliability, Developer & agent DX, Privacy / data retention, Lock-in risk (higher = worse).

When not to use the pick

Need full control of retrieval/ranking — compose Exa/Tavily + your LLM.

Lock-in / migration

Runner-up Exa has lower stored lock-in risk (4.5 vs 5.5, 0–10, higher = more lock-in).

Sourced price (no comparable unit)

Pick's lowest sourced SKU: pplx-embed-v1-0.6b $0.004 (usd_per_million_tokens) — source, as of 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-27

Cheapest matching SKU: Perplexity pplx-embed-v1-0.6b $0.004 — source, as of 2026-10-03, re-checked 2026-10-27. The pick is the cheapest.

Price history: first seen 2026-10-03 · last changed no change recorded · history JSON

Free option

• Gemini 2.5 Flash Google Search grounding free requests (free) — source, as of 2026-10-26

Failure modes to watch

• Prompt injection: Compare each tool call to the original user task. If the call only makes sense given text that arrived from a fetched page, file, or message, stop and ask. Record which source the instruction came from. This catalog does not store payloads or attack steps.
• Runaway spend: Set a budget and a tool-call cap per task. Alert when spend jumps. Stop the run at the cap instead of summarizing a partial trace as success.
• Stale retrieval: Store the source URL and the time it was fetched. If a newer canonical page exists, or two stored sources disagree, do not answer from the older one.
• Ungrounded answer: Require a source URL or passage id on factual sentences. Drop or mark any sentence whose source does not contain the claim.
• Context overflow: If the input exceeds the window, say so and retrieve a narrower slice. Do not answer from a truncated head as if it were the whole source.
• Instruction drift: Restate the stop condition in the trace. End the run when it is met. Review long traces for steps that do not serve the original task.

Reported outcomes (submitted reports only)

This job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Depot Pick (Perplexity) on this job: loading… JSON · reports never change scores · seed/test records excluded

Cite: Agent Provider Depot, Depot Pick for web-grounded-qa: perplexity, scores as of 2026-09-14. Agents: GET /api/decide?jtbd=web-grounded-qa