Perplexity

Arrives as a search-engine replacement, so people put into it what they would have typed into Google, including internal names and the document they wanted explained.

What leaks through it

Queries carrying internal project names and customer identifiers, and file uploads that carry far more than the question. It also brings untrusted web content back into the session, which is a return path most controls ignore.

• perplexity.ai
• www.perplexity.ai
• api.perplexity.ai

Guardrails once it is inspected

Alectura intercepts only tools it has been tested against. Everything else is discovered, meaning you get the app, the devices running it and how often, but the content is never decrypted, so content rules cannot run on it yet.

Today Perplexity is discovered: you get the app, the devices running it and how often, without decrypting anything. The rules below are the ones that apply to it, and they run once it is onboarded for inspection.

• MaskNo secrets in inputALC-001

  Credentials inside an uploaded file are masked before the upload completes.

• AlertDenied topicsALC-004

  Project codenames and internal product names typed into a search box, where people are least likely to think of it as sharing.

• AlertPII in input (basic)ALC-006

  Customer identifiers in a query or an attachment.

• AlertDeceptive links in model outputALC-024

  Links in the answer whose text and destination disagree, which is the phishing surface a search assistant uniquely creates.

Those are the ones worth spelling out for Perplexity. All 27 rules in the catalog apply, and you can see the full catalog.

What happens to whatever gets through

Model training

Consumer accounts expose an AI data retention toggle that governs whether searches and uploads improve the service. Enterprise Pro is excluded.

Retention

Threads persist in the account until deleted; uploads are retained with them.

Data residency

US-hosted.

The vendor’s own controls

• ·SSO (Enterprise Pro)
• ·Org-wide data retention off by default
• ·File upload controls

Sources

• Perplexity privacy policy

Vendor terms last checked August 14, 2026, and summarised from Perplexity AI’s published documentation. Confirm against the sources above before writing policy around this page.