Perplexity said on Wednesday that its Enterprise platform has achieved FedRAMP Class C, or Moderate, certification, bringing live web search and source-cited answers inside its certified environment for federal government users. The company says it is now the only FedRAMP Moderate service with live web search, a claim that matters because federal employees need current information they can check against original documents. The certification was independently assessed by 360 Advanced.
What the certification unlocks
FedRAMP is the US government’s security review programme for cloud services, and Moderate is its impact level, covering systems whose compromise could cause serious harm. Certification removes a major procurement barrier: agencies can adopt a certified service without running the security review themselves. For Perplexity, it turns a consumer-familiar answer engine into a product agencies can buy through normal channels.
Perplexity’s offering is available to agencies through the General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedule for procurement, the same channel used for Google’s Gemini for Government services. It is available to state, local and education customers through resellers, and to government contractors through Perplexity. Enterprise Pro is available through GSA’s OneGov offer for $0.25 per agency through March 31, 2027.
The practical use case is research that must be sourced. Perplexity gives the example of an analyst preparing a briefing on small-business contracting: find federal guidance, summarise what changed, identify effective dates and link to the documents. Citations let employees review the underlying evidence before acting on an answer, which is the feature Perplexity leans on most against general-purpose chatbots.
Live search inside the boundary
The distinctive part of the announcement is that live web search sits inside the FedRAMP boundary. Perplexity builds, hosts and updates its own web index, which it says tracks more than 200 billion URLs, and a user’s query is never shared with an outside search provider. That matters for agencies that cannot send sensitive questions to a public search engine.
Perplexity Enterprise also brings together models from multiple providers, letting administrators make models available depending on enterprise policy and restrict providers. Developers can use Perplexity’s search, agent and embeddings APIs to build applications with live web search and search across their documents. Agency data controls include sign-in through the agency’s identity provider and restrictions on external sharing and file actions.
Data controls for agency work
Perplexity automatically applies zero data usage protections to requests identified as originating from US government agencies. Data from those requests is not retained for training, improving or evaluating AI models, according to the company. Organisations can also configure session retention and send audit logs to a designated endpoint for monitoring, giving security teams oversight of how the service is used.
Those controls address the objection that has slowed government AI adoption: that staff questions, documents and drafts might leak into model training or vendor analytics. Perplexity’s answer is architectural rather than contractual, since the protections apply to identified government requests rather than requiring agency-by-agency negotiation. Whether agencies accept that answer will show up in procurement decisions over the coming year.
Why It Matters
Government AI procurement has become a competitive front, with vendors racing to clear security bars and price products low to win agency users early. Perplexity’s certification puts it alongside rivals with government deals, including Anthropic’s Claude offering for agencies. The differentiator Perplexity claims is live, cited web research rather than a chatbot.
That distinction could matter for federal staff, who spend time tracking policy changes and answering questions about programmes. A model that answers from training data alone goes stale the day it ships, while a cited web answer can be checked and updated. The risk: live search can surface wrong or manipulated sources, so citations help only if staff follow them.
For Perplexity, the certification is also a distribution win. Federal adoption creates a large, referenceable customer base and a procurement precedent that state and local governments often follow. The $0.25 OneGov price through March 2027 is designed to accelerate that adoption while the certification is fresh, before rival offerings lock agencies into competing platforms.
Background
Perplexity struck its first government-wide agreement with the GSA in November 2025, offering Enterprise Pro for Government through the Multiple Award Schedule at essentially no cost for up to 18 months. The FedRAMP certification is the security milestone that agreement pointed toward, moving Perplexity from a prioritised applicant to a certified supplier for federal AI research.
Source: Perplexity announcement
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