[Enhancement]: Feature: Add citation tooltips and source menu for Perplexity model (based on existing OpenAI implementation)

[Ghazi-Glanum]

What features would you like to see added?

Description:
This enhancement is related to the discussion: #7038

Following the recent feature that introduced citation tooltips and a source menu above the result text for responses generated by the OpenAI model, we propose extending the same functionality to the Perplexity model.

The implementation would aim to:

• Display inline citation tooltips for Perplexity responses, similar to OpenAI's output.
• Add a source menu above the result text, consistent with the UI behavior for OpenAI.

Example Use Case
User asks:

"What is Glanum?"

Perplexity responds:

✅ Why This Feature?
Increases trust and transparency in AI-generated responses
Mimics Perplexity’s native UX for better familiarity
Helps users verify and explore information more easily

✅ What we're going to use to implement this feature ?
After investigating the current implementation for OpenAI, we found that many of the frontend elements involved are generic and reusable.

Key components we plan to leverage include:

client/src/components/Chat/Messages/Content/Markdown.tsx

client/src/components/Web – for rendering web source previews and managing tooltips and source menus

The Perplexity model's output will be adapted to fit the expected structure where needed, and we'll reuse these components to maintain code consistency and avoid duplication.

✅What we're going to impact
To support this feature, we will make backend modifications in the following areas:

api/server/controllers/agents/request.js

Files under api/server/services/Endpoints/

These changes will focus on adapting and formatting the result returned by the Perplexity LLM to match the frontend's expected structure. This includes ensuring that source references are clearly structured so they can be correctly rendered by the existing citation and tooltip components on the client side.

[danny-avila]

Looks good to me, PR welcome!

[Ghazi-Glanum]

Hi @danny-avila
After starting implementation on the citation tooltips for the Perplexity model, we noticed an important distinction compared to the OpenAI setup:
With OpenAI's web search, citations rely on a third-party scraping/search mechanism to retrieve and present source links. However, in the case of Perplexity, the API response already includes a structured list of web citations and sources natively, meaning the web search and source attribution are built-in.
This simplifies things significantly:
-No need to integrate a separate search engine or scraper
-We can extract and render citations directly from the Perplexity API response
-This aligns well with the existing tooltip/source menu UI components used for OpenAI
Just wanted to confirm with you that we're aligned on this and that there's no need for an additional web search mechanism when using Perplexity responses.
Let me know if that makes sense or if you'd like us to structure it a particular way.
Thanks!

[bhagwad]

If I'm not mistaken, even for Gemini responses with "Grounding with Google Search" switched on, the API responses include a structured list of web citations.

[eric-glanum]

@danny-avila With the latest updates, we are unable to retrieve the “citations” and “search_results” properties from Perplexity's raw API response, which prevents us from obtaining these elements. Another issue is that the tools can no longer be activated with Perplexity, which prevents the creation of the ‘attachments’ property required for displaying the source “tabs.” Do you have any ideas on how to solve the first issue in the first instance?

[petervcook]

+1 for this one. I am using Perplexity Sonar Pro through OpenRouter.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/features/web-search#parsing-web-search-results