Citino teamTo track your brand in Perplexity, ask it your buyers’ questions on a schedule, with the same settings every time, and record what each answer says about you and which sources it cites. Perplexity is the easiest of the major engines to track, because every answer shows its sources.
This is Perplexity’s part of AI search analytics. The method is the same as for ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews; the settings and the citations are what differ.
Why Perplexity is easier to track
Perplexity says it interprets your question, searches the web and returns cited, conversational answers, with numbered citations linking to the original sources in each answer. That has two consequences for tracking:
- Every answer has sources. You do not have to guess whether an answer came from training data or from search. You can see exactly which pages it read.
- Answers follow the web. When the pages Perplexity finds for a question change, its answer can change too. A fix to the right page can show up without waiting for a new model.
Step 1: Choose the questions
Track the questions buyers ask while choosing a product like yours, in their words: category, problem, comparison, alternatives and fact-check questions. Keep branded questions in their own group, because a question that names you will almost always get an answer that names you. How to choose the prompts to track explains how to build the list.
Step 2: Fix the settings
Perplexity has settings that change how it answers, so fix them before you start:
| Setting | What Perplexity says | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Model | You can leave it on Best, which picks a model per question, or choose one | Pick one and keep it for the whole series |
| Pro Search | Applied automatically when your plan includes it | Track from the same plan every time |
| Research | Runs many searches and reads many sources to write a report | Track it separately, if at all |
Then ask the same way each time: fixed wording, a new thread for every question, nothing saved from earlier conversations, and a fixed time of day.
Step 3: Record every answer
| Field | Example (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Date and time | 2026-10-27, 09:00 UTC |
| Question | “which WMS handles multi-client billing natively?” |
| Brands named, in order | Northport, Crateline |
| Your position | Not named |
| How you were described | — |
| Numbered sources | Every cited URL, in order |
| Who owns each source | Yours, a third party, or a competitor |
The brand names are fictional. Keep the full answer text as well as the fields: the wording is where you see how Perplexity describes you, and the numbers are only as trustworthy as the answers you can trace them back to.
Step 4: Read the citations
Perplexity’s citations are the most useful part of the data. Sort them by how often they are cited for your questions, and by who owns them:
- Your own pages, cited: you are being read. If you are still not named, the page does not make the case plainly enough.
- Third-party pages that leave you out: review sites, directories, articles. These are source gaps, and getting onto them is often the fastest way to be named. How to find and fix source gaps covers how.
- Competitor pages: they explain why a competitor is named, but there is nothing for you to change on them.
Step 5: Count, with a margin of error
From the records, report per question group:
- Visibility: the share of answers that name you.
- Share of voice: your share of all brand mentions.
- Position: how early you are named, over answers that name you.
- Citation rate: the share of answers that cite at least one of your pages.
Report each with a margin of error calculated over questions rather than answers, because answers to the same question tend to agree from day to day. How to measure AI visibility explains the method. A change smaller than its margin is within noise, not a result.
Make sure Perplexity can read you
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in its search results, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt for your site to appear. Check yours does. How to get cited by Perplexity covers what to change once you know where you stand.
Where Citino helps
Citino is an AI search analytics tool. It asks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity your buyers’ questions every day, with Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude as add-ons, from a clean session with fixed wording, and keeps every answer with the brands it named and the pages it cited, sorted by who owns them. Each number carries a 95% margin of error bootstrapped over prompts, as the methodology sets out. See how Citino measures and Sources.