Once chatGPT and Claude (through MCP) added web search functionality I completely dropped Perplexity. I assume I'm not unique in this regard. Feels like the writing is on the wall for Perplexity.
I assume he's just being over dramatic. I use Perplexity every day, multiple times per day, and it almost completely replaced Google for me in such areas as coding or technological research. Also, I never used nor planning to use ChatGPT or Claude (I use private open models instead - Mistral Nemo, Qwen, etc.). But I also feel like "I'm not unique in this regard", lol.
It's mostly a decision to manage the total amount I spend on LLM tools. Given unlimited money I suppose I'd still be subscribed to Perplexity because the UI is slightly better than Claude and chatGPT for web results. But Claude and chatGPT are plenty enough for my web use cases while allowing me full access to all of their models for non web search use cases.
Yeah, I keep using the $1/mo promotions for Perplexity but I only really use it because it can read the results to me which I use for practicing foreign languages, so there's that.