Perplexity is an AI search product that answers questions by searching the web, reading results and writing a cited summary. Citations are central to its interface: every answer shows its sources, and users can open them or ask follow-ups. It offers several modes, including a deeper research mode, and it also makes the Comet AI browser. Because it cites so visibly, Perplexity is often where teams first see which of their pages AI search actually uses.
How Perplexity sources answers
Perplexity documents two user agents: PerplexityBot, which crawls to surface and link sites in its results, and Perplexity-User, which fetches pages when a user's question calls for it. Perplexity says PerplexityBot respects robots.txt. It has faced public criticism from publishers over crawling and attribution, so check its current documentation and your own logs rather than assuming.
Like other answer engines, it retrieves passages, ranks them and composes an answer, but the detailed ranking signals are not published.
Working with Perplexity
Allow PerplexityBot if you want to appear, and confirm in server logs that it receives 200 responses. Track a set of buyer prompts and record which domains get cited. Perplexity answers often draw on third-party sources such as review sites, forums and comparison articles, so your visibility depends partly on how others describe you.
- Check robots.txt and CDN rules for PerplexityBot.
- Look at which competitor and third-party pages it cites for your category.
- Make product facts easy to extract from your own pages.
- Watch referral traffic from perplexity.ai in analytics.
Example
Learning from citations
Gorsefield, a fictional customer success platform, runs 40 category prompts in Perplexity. A review site and two independent blog roundups are cited far more than any vendor's own pages. Gorsefield's review profile is outdated and it is missing from one roundup. Updating the profile and pitching the roundup's author with current information are the most direct next steps.
Common mistakes
Focusing only on your own domain
Perplexity frequently cites third parties. Your presence on those pages matters as much as your own site.
Blocking at the CDN without noticing
Bot protection can stop PerplexityBot even when robots.txt allows it.
Questions
Perplexity has not fully documented its index sources. It operates its own crawler and may use other providers; treat specifics as unconfirmed.
Not in the same form as of late 2026. Visibility is measured through prompt tracking and referral analytics.
