The Searches That Would Tell Your Family the Most Are the Ones Perplexity Deletes First

There is no form to tell them with, no deceased-user process and no legacy contact, and the account cannot be handed to anybody else. The default outcome is a dormant account and a family with nothing.

The mechanics, stated plainly enough to be quoted on their own:

• No legacy contact, and no deceased-user process. As at 29 July 2026, neither the Terms of Service nor the Privacy Notice (last updated 8 July 2026) uses the word death, deceased, estate, heir or next of kin, even once.

• The account cannot be handed on. The Terms grant a licence that is "personal, non-assignable, non-sublicensable, non-transferrable, and non-exclusive" (section 5.1), and say the agreement "may not be assigned by you without the prior express written consent of the Company" (section 11.7).

• Your questions stay your property. Section 6.4 says Perplexity "does not claim any ownership in Your Content", while taking a broad licence to host, store, reproduce, display, distribute and modify that content for as long as the content sits with Perplexity.

• A self-serve export exists, and its contents are undocumented. Sign in, open perplexity.ai/account/details, click Export my data, and a download link arrives by email. Perplexity publishes no specification of what the file holds.

• Personal information is removed within 30 days of account deletion. Section 11.3 separately says Perplexity "may, but is not obligated to, delete any of Your Content" and "shall not be responsible for the failure to delete or deletion of Your Content".

• Several classes of thread delete themselves. Threads created while logged out expire after 14 days and are "not recoverable". Incognito threads expire after 24 hours. Threads marked Temporary expire whenever personal context is involved. Uploaded files and images are retained for 30 days, or 7 days on Enterprise Pro.

• A next of kin has no read route. No feature, no ticket type, no clause. In US states that have adopted the uniform digital assets act, an executor has a statutory route to disclosure of data, which is not the same as access to the login.

If you have arrived here after a death, holding a certificate and a support ticket number, skip to the statutory section, because that is the only part of this page you can act on. If your question is assistants generally, what happens to your ChatGPT memories when you die is the hub for this series.

I read both legal documents in full on 29 July 2026, looking for the paragraph that deals with a dead user. Neither mentions death in any form, and that absence is the finding. Every vendor in this series leaves the same gap, and what is specific to Perplexity is which clauses fill the vacuum.

Section 5.1 permits use of the Services "for your personal, non-commercial use only", and the licence attached is personal and non-transferrable. Section 11.7 lets the company assign the agreement and forbids you from doing the same. Between them there is no version of a will that moves your login to your daughter.

Section 6.4 cuts the other way. Perplexity "does not claim any ownership in Your Content", and your inputs are Your Content. So the questions are yours. What you cannot pass on is the room they are kept in.

Section 11.3 is candid for a terms document: on deletion Perplexity "may, but is not obligated to, delete any of Your Content", and "shall not be responsible for the failure to delete or deletion of Your Content". The help centre promises removal of personal information within 30 days of account deletion, and describes what normally happens. The Terms reserve the right for the normal thing not to.

Your data is yours for the purposes of ownership, the company's for the purposes of retention, and nobody's at all for the purposes of inheritance.

Perplexity's GDPR compliance article states, twice, that the right of access is self-serve: "Sign in and visit https://www.perplexity.ai/account/details, then click the Export my data button. You will receive an email with a download link to your data."

What comes out of the button is anybody's guess. There is no help-centre article devoted to the export, and the self-serve data deletion article never mentions the button once. The only description of the feature lives inside an article about statutory rights, and a right of access is a right to a copy of the personal data held about you, which is a narrower promise than a full copy of your threads. Perplexity does not say whether the button appears for everyone or only in jurisdictions with a statutory access right, and nobody outside the company can say whether the file holds your threads or a profile and a billing record. I will not guess on a page families may act on.

You can settle it for your own account in about a minute, and step one below says how. If your threads are in the file, you have what you came for. If not, you have found that out while there is still time for the slower manual work. If Perplexity ever publishes a specification, this page changes.

Several classes of thread delete themselves, and the categories are uncomfortably well aimed.

Logged-out threads expire after 14 days and are, in the help centre's own word, "not recoverable". Incognito threads expire after 24 hours, and the help centre recommends Incognito "for sensitive queries you don't need to save". A thread marked "Temporary" expires whenever personal context is involved, which the article says includes attaching a file or using a connector, and in the Comet browser always includes queries touching open tabs, browsing history or an agentic event. Uploaded files and images last 30 days, 7 days on Enterprise Pro, after which their contents stop being available for follow-ups.

Line those rules up against how people behave. The searches you ran without signing in, because you did not want them attached to your name. The searches you ran in Incognito, because the help centre told you Incognito is what sensitive queries are for. Those are the sessions that would tell somebody the most about a given month of your life, and the platform is engineered to drop them first, fastest, and without a restore path.

None of that is sinister. Short retention is decent privacy work, and on an ordinary Tuesday it is exactly what you would want from a company holding your medical questions. Two reasonable designs pull in opposite directions, and only one is switched on by default.

Your durable history lives in your Library at perplexity.ai/library, and that is the part worth building a plan around.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

The obvious plan is that your executor requests the export on your behalf. That plan fails three ways.

The GDPR does not apply to dead people. Recital 27 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 says "This Regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons." Member States may write their own rules, and some have, France and Spain among them. So the right behind the export button is personal to you, and it lapses at your death unless your national law has extended that right.

The authorised-agent route fails for the same reason. The Privacy Notice lets you designate an agent "in writing or through a power of attorney document", and "A power of attorney terminates when: (1) the principal dies" (Uniform Power of Attorney Act, Ala. Code s 26-1A-110(a)(1)).

Verification closes the gap. Perplexity verifies identity "by phone or email, or by having you log into your account", and with an agent "we may need you to verify your identity directly with us". Both need a living person.

One route does survive you, and it is American. Most US states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which sets a priority order. A direction given through a provider's online tool comes first and overrides a contrary direction in a will, provided the tool lets the user change or delete that direction at any time. Without such a tool, the user "may allow or prohibit in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record" disclosure to a fiduciary, and that direction "overrides a contrary provision in a terms-of-service agreement" (Ala. Code s 19-1A-4).

Perplexity offers no online tool: no legacy contact, no beneficiary setting, nothing to configure. That failure pushes an executor to tier two, where a clause in your will can direct disclosure and the non-transferability language does not defeat the direction.

Ala. Code s 19-1A-8 says a custodian "shall disclose" to the personal representative of a deceased user's estate the catalogue of electronic communications and "digital assets, other than the content of electronic communications", on a written request with a death certificate and letters testamentary or a court order, unless the user prohibited disclosure or the court directs otherwise. A digital asset is "an electronic record in which an individual has a right or interest", which your threads plainly are. The content of electronic communications sits behind the higher bar at s 19-1A-7, needing the user's own consent or a court direction.

Whether a typed query is an electronic communication is unsettled. The term takes its meaning from 18 U.S.C. s 2510(12), which is about transfers of communications, and a question typed into a search engine is not obviously a message to another person. If your threads are digital assets but not the content of electronic communications, an executor's claim stands on the easier footing. Perplexity has published no position, and as at 29 July 2026 we could find no published US decision settling the point.

So name digital assets explicitly in your will, including AI assistant accounts, and state whether you allow or prohibit disclosure. None of this is legal advice, and a solicitor who knows your estate beats a web page. This is a US framework, so elsewhere you are back to a terms document and the goodwill of a support inbox. Who actually controls your identity after you die sets the same asymmetry out across the accounts, likeness and voice that outlive you.

Every row was checked against the vendor's own published policy on 29 July 2026, and these policies change without notice, so the date is the important column.

One row has a succession feature, and Google did not design Inactive Account Manager for Gemini. That tool was built for the Google Account years earlier, and Gemini history rides along by accident of architecture. Setting up Google Inactive Account Manager takes about ten minutes. Seven vendors, and the only working answer is a side effect.

1. Sign in at perplexity.ai/account/details and click Export my data. A download link arrives by email. Open the file and look at what is inside.

2. Open your Library at perplexity.ai/library and save the threads that matter, one at a time. Perplexity documents a per-thread export to PDF, and copying the text into a document you control works anywhere. Both are tedious, and both let you see what you are getting.

3. Stop using Incognito and logged-out sessions for research you would want kept. Those expire in 24 hours and 14 days. Use a normal signed-in thread and delete later if you change your mind.

4. Decide about AI training. AI data retention is enabled by default for Free, Pro and Max accounts, and the toggle sits in account settings under Preferences. Opting out only covers data collected after you switch the setting off, and the help centre states that previously collected training data cannot be deleted or removed.

5. Add a digital assets clause to your will, naming AI assistant accounts and stating whether you allow disclosure. Under the uniform act that direction beats the terms of service.

Those five steps save the record. Do them this week. None of them involves me.

They also have a ceiling, identical across all seven assistants.

A search history is evidence that somebody was working something out. It is not a record of what they decided, or why. An export can hand a family every question a person asked at two in the morning and no way at all to know whether an answer ever came.

Read a life back through its own anxious queries and the life looks smaller and more worried than the life was. Your children inherit your uncertainty and none of your judgement.

Afterlife.ai™ works on the other side of that gap, and I build the product, so read this as what we ship rather than a claim about anybody else. A guide called Idy interviews you, in sittings, over time, and the questions go after the reasoning rather than the record: how you decide things, what you were weighing, what you had already ruled out and why. Those answers become memories, and your voice is cloned from recordings you make. You nominate who may reach the material, nothing is released while you are alive, and release runs through Executor Lock, which holds for seven days on verified evidence, against a snapshot of the memories taken at that moment.

Three honest limits. Personas are likenesses built from what a person chose to record, never a continuation of that person, and concrete facts are held to your own memories, so nothing you did not say gets said for you. None of this reaches backwards, because we cannot import your Perplexity threads or any other assistant history. And a cloned voice sounds like you long before the answers do.

The free build does not expire, because the worst version of this industry charges a grieving family at the moment they are least able to say no. Why you are more worth recording than you think answers the commonest objection, and what each plan includes covers a paid build.

Perplexity will keep answering your questions and quietly forgetting that you asked them. The only real decision left is whether the record your family finds is the one that happened to accumulate, or the one you sat down and made.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

Can my family get into my Perplexity account after I die?

No, not as you. The Terms grant a personal, non-transferable licence and bar you from assigning the agreement without Perplexity's written consent, and there is no legacy contact or beneficiary feature. In US states that have adopted the uniform digital assets act, an executor can request disclosure of digital assets with a death certificate and letters testamentary, which is disclosure of data rather than access to the login.

Does Perplexity delete everything when I die?

Not automatically, because Perplexity is not told. Retention is tied to the account being active, and personal information is removed within 30 days of account deletion. Nobody deletes an account nobody knows about, so in practice a dormant account simply sits there. Temporary, Incognito and logged-out threads still expire on their own schedule regardless.

How do I download my Perplexity history right now?

Sign in, go to perplexity.ai/account/details and click Export my data. You will be emailed a download link. Perplexity does not publish what the file contains, so open it and check rather than assuming. For anything the export misses, work through your Library at perplexity.ai/library thread by thread, using the documented per-thread export to PDF or a plain copy into a document you control.

Can I leave my Perplexity account to someone in my will?

You cannot leave the account, because the account is not assignable. You can direct disclosure of the data. In US states following the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, a direction in a will overrides a contrary provision in a terms-of-service agreement, so naming AI assistant accounts explicitly is worth doing and costs nothing.

I used Incognito for the things that actually mattered. Are those gone?

Yes, those are gone. Incognito threads expire after 24 hours and threads created while logged out expire after 14 days, which the help centre describes as not recoverable. There is no restore path. If a subject was important enough to research privately, the practical answer is to write down what you concluded somewhere you control.

What does Afterlife.ai cost, and who owns what I record?

Fifty memories are free, with no card required and no expiry on the free build, and the plans page covers what a paid build adds if you later want more than that. Your recordings and memories are yours. You choose who is nominated, you can delete the whole build at any point before release, and nothing reaches anyone until Executor Lock completes its seven-day evidence-verified hold.

What happens to what I recorded if Afterlife.ai shuts down?

You can export your memories and your conversations at any time, which is deliberate, because a company that asks you to record your life owes you a way out of the company. How Executor Lock verifies a death before anything is released sets out the release and snapshot commitments in full. Judge any service in this category on whether it answers this question at all.

• What happens to your ChatGPT memories when you die, the hub for this series.

• What happens to your Grok conversations when you die, the other vendor with no published route.

• What happens to your Claude conversations when you die, for long project threads.

• What happens to your Gemini history when you die, the one working succession tool.

• Who controls your identity after you die, the wider picture.

• What happens to your Facebook account when you die, for the social half of the record.

• How Executor Lock verifies a death before anything is released, for whoever will administer this.

Every claim about Perplexity comes from Perplexity's own published documents, read in full and checked on 29 July 2026 and listed below. The legal positions come from primary sources rather than commentary: the text of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, and the enacted state text of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act and the Uniform Power of Attorney Act. Table rows come from each vendor's own policy page, linked in the table. The passages describing Afterlife.ai™ are first-hand rather than sourced, because I build the product, and they are written to include the limits.

1. Perplexity AI, Privacy Notice, last updated 8 July 2026.

2. Perplexity AI, Terms of Service, last updated 23 January 2026, sections 5.1, 6.4, 11.3, 11.7.

3. Perplexity Help Center, GDPR Compliance at Perplexity, last updated 28 July 2026.

4. Perplexity Help Center, How long does Perplexity retain my search history, profile data, and personal information?, last updated 16 July 2026.

5. Perplexity Help Center, Account Deletion, last updated 28 July 2026.

6. Perplexity Help Center, Self-Serve Data Deletion.

7. Perplexity Help Center, Where did my sessions go?, last updated 16 July 2026.

8. Perplexity Help Center, Data Collection at Perplexity, last updated 16 July 2026.

9. Perplexity Help Center, Security and Privacy with File Uploads, last updated 16 July 2026, for the 30-day file retention and the per-thread export to PDF.

10. Perplexity Help Center, Technical capabilities of Sessions, last updated 16 July 2026, for the 14-day expiry of signed-out sessions.

11. Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), Recital 27, EUR-Lex CELEX 32016R0679, in force 25 May 2018.

12. CNIL (Laboratoire d'innovation numerique), Post-mortem data: is there a digital life after death?, for the French and Spanish national rules on the data of deceased persons. Checked 30 July 2026.

13. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, user direction and effect on terms of service, Ala. Code s 19-1A-4 (Act 2017-316).

14. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, disclosure of the content of electronic communications of a deceased user, Ala. Code s 19-1A-7.

15. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, disclosure of other digital assets of a deceased user, Ala. Code s 19-1A-8.

16. Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, definitions of digital asset and electronic communication, Ala. Code s 19-1A-2.

17. Uniform Power of Attorney Act, termination on death of the principal, Ala. Code s 26-1A-110(a)(1).

Something here wrong or out of date? Send us the correction and we will check the source and fix the page.

Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. Platform policy checked: 29 July 2026. This page is on a 30-day recheck cycle.