AI Tool of the Week: Uncover hidden patent gems effortlessly

What problem does Perplexity AI patent search solve?

Innovation teams and R&D groups often spend months developing ideas, only to discover late in the process that closely related patents already exist. This can lead to costly pivots, legal exposure, or even abandoned projects after significant investment. Traditional patent databases rely on rigid keyword and Boolean searches, which can be challenging to use without IP expertise, and often make it difficult to view the broader landscape of related filings across jurisdictions.​

Perplexity Patents addresses this by combining natural language search with an AI patent research agent that works over a dedicated patent index. Perplexity Patents is an AI-powered patent research experience available on Perplexity AI that automatically recognizes patent-oriented queries and returns collections of relevant patents with key metadata and links to the original documents.

Instead of wrestling with complex search syntax, teams can ask plain-language questions about technologies, use cases, or companies and iteratively refine their understanding of the prior-art landscape

How to access: https://www.perplexity.ai/

Perplexity AI Patent Search can help you:

• Validate ideas quickly: Use natural language queries to check for related patents and prior art before investing heavily in development or filing strategies, reducing the chance of overlooking critical existing work.

• Understand the patent landscape: Explore who is active in a space, what types of solutions have been claimed.

• Explore potential whitespace: By comparing crowded areas (with many similar patents) to less-represented concepts or applications, you can identify regions that appear underexplored.

Example:

Suppose your team is developing an AI-powered quality control system for manufacturing. Here is how Perplexity Patents can fit into your workflow:

• Start broad

Ask: “Are there patents related to AI-driven quality control in manufacturing?"

Perplexity can surface a set of related patents with titles, assignees, publication dates, and links, helping you see how crowded the general idea space is.

• Refine with context

Follow up with: “Find patents on vision-based defect detection for automotive parts" or “Show patents focused on inline visual inspection in automotive manufacturing."

• Deep-dive analysis

You can then use conversational prompts to structure and analyze what you see, for example:

“Group these patents by company and highlight the most active assignees."

“Summarize the key ideas or claimed approaches in these 10 patents."

“List patents in this area published in the last few years and group them by assignee."

“Highlight aspects of AI-based quality control in manufacturing that appear less frequently in this set of patents."

• Export and extend

Perplexity (especially when used together with Labs and code-friendly workflows) can organize results into structured tables, which you can then export as CSV or use to generate charts that visualize clusters, timelines, or assignee activity.

What makes Perplexity AI Patent Search special?

• Natural language first: You can ask open-ended questions about technologies, industries, or use cases instead of constructing complex Boolean queries, lowering the barrier for non-experts to explore patents.​

• Automatic patent recognition: When your query is clearly about patents, Perplexity automatically activates its patent-oriented retrieval without requiring you to switch tools or modes manually.​

• Accessible but not a legal substitute: Perplexity Patents makes patent exploration significantly more intuitive and faster for innovation teams, but it is a research assistant, not a replacement for professional patent searches or legal opinions.

Mint's ‘AI tool of the week’ is excerpted from Leslie D'Monte's weekly TechTalk newsletter. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your email inbox.

Note: The tools and analysis featured in this section demonstrated clear value based on our internal testing. Our recommendations are entirely independent and not influenced by the tool creators.

Jaspreet Bindra is co-founder and CEO, and Anuj Magazine is co-founder, of AI&Beyond.