Competitive Brief: Call Sheet
Researched: Google · for Perplexity reps
Today's angle
On August 13, 2026 Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, its workhorse model for coding and agents, just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, at an introductory price of $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens (half the prior model's launch price). Coding and agent benchmarks jumped over 3.6 Flash: DeepSWE v1.1 65.3% vs 49.0% and WebDev Arena Elo 1588 vs 1538.
Objection handling
"Google just said its agent routes to Claude too. Isn't that multi-model already?"
Counter: Acknowledge Google's Claude routing, then ask which models their teams rely on. Show every one of them running together in Perplexity today, including GPT and Grok, which Google's agent does not route to.
"Google gives me AI answers free in Search. Why would I pay $20 for Perplexity?"
Counter: Concede the price axis, win on trust and neutrality; the buyer who cares what they act on will pay for verifiability.
"Perplexity is just a wrapper on other people's models. Google owns its models and infrastructure."
Counter: Answer the 'wrapper' label head on: routing across every major model is the buyer's protection against being tied to one lab's roadmap.
"Nine publishers are suing Perplexity for copyright. What's our exposure if we standardize on it?"
Counter: Acknowledge the risk plainly, then show the licensing trajectory and category context so legal/compliance can get comfortable.
"I read Perplexity's Comet browser had serious security holes. Can we trust it with our data?"
Counter: Point to SPACE's per-session credential isolation on Computer agent sessions as the current architecture, not just a past patch. A CISO trusts a vendor whose isolation model keeps advancing over one still leaning on a fix from months ago.
"Is Perplexity stable enough to bet on against a trillion-dollar Google?"
Counter: Answer with the growth and enterprise-adoption proof points, and reframe the stability question to the buyer's actual time horizon.
"I heard a lawsuit says Perplexity sends user chats to Google and Meta, even in Incognito."
Counter: Acknowledge the suit, separate consumer-tier allegations from the enterprise data posture, and point security buyers to Portable Computer or Hybrid Compute, whichever matches their hardware, where sensitive data is masked or never leaves the machine.
"Perplexity quietly cut Pro usage limits. Is the pricing even stable?"
Counter: Steer the conversation to Enterprise SLAs, where consumer rate-limit noise doesn't apply.
"Google says Gemini 4 Argon beats everything on benchmarks. Why not just wait for that?"
Counter: Tell the buyer to run their evaluation on what is actually available now, Gemini included, inside Perplexity's multi-model routing, instead of waiting on Argon's undated rollout.
Agent Scout · every claim verified against its source · 78 claims tracked