Google Lens is the first result you get on Google if you search “what is this”.
It seems like Google Lens team SEOed their way to the top of Google search and since Perplexity response works by using RAG with search engine content it responds with the info from the top search result plus some own context/hallucination lol.
I have no idea why you're being downvoted, this was my first thought. There's no way that Google played by the same rules as everyone else to get to the top of a query like "what is this".
It seems like Google Lens team SEOed their way to the top of Google search and since Perplexity response works by using RAG with search engine content it responds with the info from the top search result plus some own context/hallucination lol.