Cobalt Capture for Perplexity

This page is for anyone using Perplexity who wants its research to end in something they can send to a colleague. No terminal, no repo, no code. If you are working in an editor instead, the rest of the feedback for AI coding agents hub covers Cursor, Claude Code, and the others.

The problem with research that lives in a chat thread

Perplexity is good at working through a product. Ask it to look at a competitor's pricing page and it will read the tiers, do the arithmetic, and tell you where the jump from Starter to Pro stops making sense. That part works.

Two things go wrong after that. First, the answer is text. Perplexity can read a page but it cannot render one, so it can describe a confusing pricing table without ever showing it to you. Second, the answer is trapped. It sits in a thread that scrolls away, and when your colleague asks "which plan were you looking at", you are back to pasting links and re-explaining.

What you actually wanted was a document: the verdict at the top, the screenshots underneath, at a URL you can send to someone.

The Cobalt workflow with Perplexity

Connect the server once, in Perplexity's own settings. You need Pro, Max, or Enterprise, which is where custom connectors live.

1. Settings, then Connectors, then + Custom connector, then Remote.
2. Paste https://cobaltcapture.com/mcp.
3. Leave Transport on Streamable HTTP and Auth on None. There is no login and no API key. Do not pick SSE; Cobalt does not serve that transport and the connector will sit there doing nothing.

Then ask for what you want, in ordinary language:

• Run a pricing teardown of https://example.com/pricing
• Run a positioning audit of https://example.com
• Compare Linear, Jira, and Asana for a team of ten, with a Cobalt review

Perplexity works through the study and hands back a review URL. Open it and you have the summary at the top, then each screenshot with the finding written underneath, plus a save link so it stays on your account.

Why this works for Perplexity specifically

Cobalt takes the screenshots for it. This is the part that makes the difference. Perplexity has no browser it can capture from, so Cobalt renders each page server-side and attaches the image, desktop and phone. Your assistant gets to see what it captured, and so do you. A review of a pricing page that contains the actual pricing page is a different artifact from a paragraph describing one.

The studies are written, not improvised. A pricing page teardown is a maintained playbook with a method behind it: a defined question, consistent lenses, severity anchored to outcomes rather than taste. The same is true of positioning audits and head-to-head comparisons. You supply the URL. Everything else is inferred or confirmed in one approval step.

The output outlives the conversation. A review is a page with its own link. Send it to a colleague, keep it for the next quarter's re-run, or hand it to a developer who can act on it.

Alternatives and tradeoffs

Just asking Perplexity without the connector is fine for a quick answer you will not need again. You lose the screenshots and the shareable page.

Screenshotting the pages yourself gives you full control and works for any site, including ones behind a login. It also costs you the time the assistant was supposed to save. You can mix the two: capture a logged-in screen yourself and add it to the same review.

Studies that need an account are limited from Perplexity. A usability pass or a flow walkthrough has to sign up and click through a product, which needs an agent driving a real browser. From Perplexity those studies cover the public, logged-out screens and say so rather than pretending otherwise. Pricing teardowns, positioning audits, and comparisons read public pages, so they run in full.

Custom connectors need a paid Perplexity plan. That is Perplexity's line, not ours. Cobalt itself is free to try, and a free review stays live for seven days.