Citino teamHow Perplexity answers
Perplexity is a search-first assistant. For almost every question it searches the web, reads the results and writes an answer with numbered sources beside it. That makes it the easiest engine to study: you can see exactly which pages each answer relied on.
Perplexity says it runs its own index, which it describes as covering hundreds of billions of web pages.
Allow the right Perplexity crawler
From Perplexity’s crawler documentation:
| Bot | What it does | Notes |
|---|---|---|
PerplexityBot | Crawls to surface and link websites in Perplexity’s results | Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models |
Perplexity-User | Fetches a page when a user asks about it | Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, since a user requested it |
If you want to be cited, allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and in any firewall or CDN bot rules.
What makes a page easy to cite
Because Perplexity quotes passages, the pages it uses tend to share a few traits:
- The answer comes first. A section that opens with a one- or two-sentence answer, then the detail, is easier to lift than one that builds up to its point.
- Facts are specific and sourced. Numbers, dates, named sources and concrete claims. The GEO research found that adding statistics, quotations and citations to a page raised its visibility in generated answers.
- Everything important is in text. Not inside images, embedded PDFs you link to without summarising, or content that only appears after a script runs.
- It is dated. A visible “updated” date and current information help when the question is about something that changes, such as pricing or features.
Be where Perplexity looks
Run your buyers’ questions in Perplexity and read the source list. For most commercial questions you will see a mix of review sites, comparison articles, vendor pages and community discussion. Each source that names a competitor but not you is a candidate source gap.
The fixes differ by source type: get listed on a review site, correct an outdated profile, ask a writer to review your product, or join a discussion with a genuinely useful answer. Do not post fake reviews or planted comments; they break platform rules and tend to backfire.
How to check where you stand
Perplexity’s visible sources make tracking practical:
- Ask each tracked question several times.
- Record whether you are named, your position, and every source cited.
- Count how often each source appears across all your questions. The pages cited most often are where to focus first.
How Citino tracks Perplexity
Citino asks your tracked questions in Perplexity daily and keeps every answer with its sources, so you can see which pages drive the answers you lose and rank them by how much getting onto them should recover.