How do I get my business cited by Perplexity?

Perplexity is the most transparent of the AI search tools: every answer shows its sources, numbered, next to the sentences they support. That transparency is the advantage for a business owner. You can see exactly which pages it trusts for your market, which means you can work out precisely what it would take to be one of them.

How Perplexity builds an answer

Perplexity's help centre describes it as an answer engine. When someone asks a question, it searches the web in real time, reads a set of sources, and writes a summary with numbered citations linking back to them. Its deeper research modes run many searches in a row and read far more pages before answering.

Two of its crawlers matter to you. Perplexity's crawler documentation describes them like this:

• PerplexityBot collects pages so they can be surfaced and linked in Perplexity's search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, and it follows robots.txt.
• Perplexity-User visits a page when a user's question needs it. Because a person asked for that visit, Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt.

If PerplexityBot cannot read your site, you are relying on other sites to describe you. That is the first thing to check.

It also helps to know what Perplexity does not do. There is no form to submit your site, no business directory of its own to join, and no way for an owner to edit what it says. Its answers are only ever as good as the pages it finds, which is why every step below is about the pages: yours, and the ones that already mention your competitors. The same pages tend to help in Google and ChatGPT as well, so none of this effort is wasted if Perplexity turns out to be a small channel for you.

Step one: let PerplexityBot in

Look at your robots.txt, the small text file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may read. If it contains User-agent: PerplexityBot followed by Disallow: /, or a blanket rule blocking all bots, Perplexity is shut out. Either remove the rule or add User-agent: PerplexityBot with Allow: /.

Then check one level deeper. Some hosting and security services have a setting that blocks "AI bots" at the firewall, before robots.txt is even read, and some switch it on by default. If your host offers one, make sure PerplexityBot is allowed. Perplexity publishes the IP addresses its crawler uses, so a developer can allow them specifically.

Perplexity says changes can take up to 24 hours to be reflected. Blocking crawlers that train AI models, such as OpenAI's GPTBot, does not affect Perplexity. The guide to whether to block AI crawlers sets out which bots to allow and which you can safely refuse.

Step two: get onto the pages it already cites

Ask Perplexity the questions your buyers ask: "best [service] in [town]", "how much does [service] cost", "[your business] or [competitor]". Write down every source it cites. Run it in a private browser window so your own history does not shape the result.

The sources usually fall into a few groups:

• Directories and trade bodies: complete your profile, with the same details as your website.
• Review platforms: ask recent customers to review you there, and reply to every review.
• Round-up and comparison articles: contact the author with genuinely useful information, such as photographs, a price range or a short expert comment.
• Forums and community threads: if a real discussion is cited, the lesson is the question it answers. Do not post fake recommendations; they are easy to spot and damage trust.
• Competitors' own pages: note what they publish that you do not.

Step three: write pages it can quote

Perplexity places its citations beside the individual sentences they support. That rewards pages where each sentence stands on its own.

1. One question per section. Use the buyer's own wording as the heading, then answer it in the first sentence underneath.
2. Give the number and what changes it. "Most garden offices take three to four weeks on site, longer if the ground needs levelling" can be cited. "Timelines vary" cannot.
3. Name things. Your town, your service, your materials, your qualifications. Pronouns and slogans lose meaning when a sentence is lifted out of context.
4. Keep key facts in text. Prices in an image, opening hours in a PDF, services in a slideshow: a crawler may never read them.
5. Show who wrote it. A named author with relevant experience, and a date, tell a reader (and a machine) why the page deserves trust.

Perplexity cites sentences, not websites. The page that contains the clearest single sentence answering the question is the one that gets the link.

Step four: keep it current

Because Perplexity searches at the moment someone asks, your page is compared with whatever else exists that day. An old price, a closed branch or a service you no longer offer makes the page less useful and can contradict newer sources. Review your main pages at least twice a year, update the facts, and change the "last updated" date only when something on the page genuinely changed. Keep your XML sitemap (the list of pages you give search engines) up to date as well.

If you sell products

Perplexity runs a free programme for retailers, Perplexity for Merchants, for sharing product details directly. Perplexity says product recommendations are decided by relevance and ratings, and that advertisers cannot pay to be listed. Complete, accurate product data, with clear specifications and genuine reviews, is what improves your chances. For a service business this does not apply, and the steps above are the whole job.

How to know if it is working

Three simple checks, monthly:

• Re-run the same questions and record whether you are cited, for which sentence, and alongside whom.
• Look for perplexity.ai as a referrer in your website analytics. Visits from citations arrive as referral traffic.
• Ask new enquirers how they found you, and include Perplexity as an option on your enquiry form.

The guide to tracking brand mentions in AI tools turns this into a routine that covers ChatGPT and Google too. If Perplexity cites you but ChatGPT still names a competitor, the guide to why ChatGPT recommends your competitor covers the differences.

What does not work

• Repeating keywords. A page stuffed with "best accountant Manchester" reads worse to a person and gives a machine nothing new to cite.
• Mass-produced AI pages. Hundreds of near-identical pages tend to rank poorly in search generally, and add nothing a citation could point to.
• Paying for placement on low-quality "top 10" sites. If the site is not one Perplexity already trusts, the listing does nothing.
• Expecting overnight results. Crawler fixes can show within days. Listings and third-party mentions take weeks to months.

Perplexity is one part of a wider picture. The main guide to AI search visibility explains how the same groundwork gets you named across all the tools, and M/AFZAL's AI visibility audit checks Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews side by side.