How to get your business cited by Perplexity
Perplexity builds every answer by retrieving and citing live sources in real time, rather than relying only on what a model learned during training - which means what's on your site right now genuinely matters, not just what existed a year ago.
How Perplexity actually builds an answer
Unlike a chat model answering purely from training data, Perplexity runs a live search, retrieves a set of current pages, and generates an answer with numbered citations back to those sources. This makes it closer to a search engine with a writer attached than a static knowledge base - your current site content has a direct shot at citation, unlike with training-only recall.
Make sure PerplexityBot can actually reach you
Perplexity's crawler needs to fetch your pages the same as any other bot, and it mostly does not execute JavaScript, so content that only appears after scripts run is invisible to it. Check your robots.txt isn't blocking PerplexityBot, and view your page's raw HTML source to confirm the actual text is present, not just placeholder markup waiting to be filled in by a script.
Give it something specific enough to quote
Perplexity favours passages that answer a question completely in a sentence or two - a specific claim, a number, a named process - over vague brand language that needs interpretation. "We offer flexible solutions" gives it nothing to cite; "Same-day quotes, fixed pricing, licensed and insured" is quotable as written. Write your key facts so they could be lifted verbatim.
Structured data and freshness both help
Organization and Product schema give Perplexity unambiguous facts to work from rather than requiring it to infer them from prose. A visible last-updated date and genuinely current content also matter more here than for a training-based model, since Perplexity is actively weighing how fresh a source is at retrieval time, not just how authoritative it once was.
Existing authority still does most of the work
Perplexity leans on pages that already rank well and are referenced elsewhere - reviews, directories, press mentions, other sites linking to you. There is no shortcut around this: the entity-graph and authority-building work that helps traditional SEO and other AI assistants helps Perplexity citation for the same underlying reason, it trusts corroborated sources more than isolated ones.
Checking what it currently says
Ask Perplexity the questions your customers would ask, and note whether you are cited, what is claimed about you, and which competitors appear instead. AuditHQ's AI Visibility suite checks crawler access, structured data and answer clarity as part of the free scan, covering the technical half of what determines whether Perplexity can cite you at all.
Frequently asked questions
Does Perplexity use the same crawler as ChatGPT?
No, Perplexity uses its own crawler, PerplexityBot, separate from OpenAI's GPTBot. Each AI platform runs its own crawler with its own robots.txt user-agent, so blocking one does not block the others, and each needs to be checked and allowed individually if you want to appear across all of them.
Can I see what Perplexity currently says about my business?
Yes, simply ask it the questions a customer would - your business name directly, and category questions like best providers in your area. There is no dashboard showing every mention, so periodic manual checks against your most important queries remain the most direct way to monitor it.
Does blocking AI crawlers stop Perplexity from citing me?
Yes, if PerplexityBot is disallowed in robots.txt it cannot fetch your pages to cite them at all. Some businesses choose this deliberately over content licensing concerns, but it also removes any chance of the visibility and traffic a citation can bring - it is a genuine trade-off either way.