How do I get my business cited by Perplexity?

To give Perplexity a chance to cite your business, let its crawler, PerplexityBot, read your site. Perplexity’s own docs recommend that. The Perplexity pages linked here don’t provide a rule for which page gets cited, so no one can promise you a citation.

This guide puts what AI answers advise next to what Perplexity’s own pages say, and shows what Perplexity cited when we asked our buyers’ questions.

How do you get cited by Perplexity?

Start with the crawler. Perplexity’s crawler page recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt, and that is the one step its own pages state. Writing plain, answer-first pages is our own editorial advice, not something a Perplexity page says. The AI answers mixed the two together.

On Sep 30, 2026 we asked the models behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, via their APIs with web search, “How do I get my business cited by Perplexity?” We asked it 3 ways (3 different wordings, once each), so 9 answers came back. All 9 answered, and none named Answersky. 7 of the 9 mentioned robots.txt and 6 mentioned PerplexityBot. 6 mentioned reviews, 6 mentioned schema or structured data, and 6 told us to keep pages updated or fresh. 4 mentioned Bing, 4 mentioned Reddit, 3 mentioned Cloudflare, and 1 mentioned an llms.txt file.

Those counts are what AI said, not proof that any of it matters. The rest of this guide checks each piece against the Perplexity pages linked here, and where a page doesn’t say it, we say so.

What does Perplexity say about how it picks sources?

It describes what a cited answer looks like. The Perplexity pages linked here don’t provide a rule for which page gets cited. Perplexity’s help page says “Each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources”.

Its Pro Search page describes synthesizing “from a diverse and high-quality set of sources”, “drawing from articles, academic papers, forums, videos, and more”. In a September 2025 engineering post, Perplexity says its own search index “tracks over 200 billion unique URLs”. That number can change, so treat it as a figure from September 2025.

None of those pages says why one page is cited over another. That is the honest gap, and it is why this guide can’t give you a ranking recipe.

One more page is easy to over-read. Perplexity marks some sites with source labels, such as “Government”, “Academic” or “Trusted”, and asks questions like “Does the site correct its mistakes?” and “Does it say who wrote each piece?”. The page says “No label does not mean a site is low quality”. It describes labels on sites. It doesn’t say labels decide which sources get cited. On Sep 30, 2026, one of Perplexity’s three answers to our question linked that page as if it did, which is a good example of why we checked.

Can PerplexityBot read your site?

Only if both your robots.txt and any firewall or CDN in front of your site let it in. The first part is the one point Perplexity’s docs state directly. Perplexity’s crawler page says “To ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site’s robots.txt file and permitting requests from our published IP ranges”.

There are two names to know. PerplexityBot “is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity”. Perplexity-User is a different fetcher. It visits a page when someone asks Perplexity a question, and the page says it “generally ignores robots.txt rules”. Changes to your robots.txt “may take up to 24 hours” to show on Perplexity’s side.

The second part is access. The same page has a section on allowing these bots through a web application firewall, including Cloudflare. 3 of the 9 answers mentioned Cloudflare, so it is worth a look if you use it. A robots.txt that allows the crawler isn’t enough if a firewall rule turns it away.

Our own robots.txt. On Oct 4, 2026, these four lines were in our robots.txt, next to a sitemap line:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

Those rules allow the two user agents in robots.txt. They aren’t proof that PerplexityBot can reach our pages, since a firewall or CDN rule could still turn it away, and they aren’t proof that it has visited. They aren’t a result either: answersky.com was cited in 0 of the 9 answers to this question on Sep 30, 2026. Allowing the crawler is one step, and a citation is a separate thing that nobody controls.

To run the same check for ChatGPT, see the “Can ChatGPT read my website at all?” section of why ChatGPT doesn’t recommend my business.

What sources does Perplexity use?

For our question, mostly pages written about this exact question, and often Perplexity’s own. On Sep 30, 2026, Perplexity’s 3 answers linked 58 pages on 34 different sites. 18 of those 58 pages were Perplexity’s own help center, developer docs and blog. Most of the rest were how-to posts on the blogs of SEO and marketing companies, which we don’t name here. ChatGPT’s answers to the same question linked only Perplexity’s own pages: 5 links, all on perplexity.ai.

Across all 9 buyer questions in our Sep 30, 2026 scan, Perplexity’s answers cited 17 different sites each on average, and ChatGPT’s cited 2.5. The ChatGPT figure includes answers with no citations at all, so it is a mean, not a typical answer. Neither number includes Gemini: the cited sites come from the ChatGPT and Perplexity answers only, and Gemini’s cited sites are left out for now, until we resolve how its API returns sources.

What we can say without overreaching: for this question, the pages cited were ones written about this exact question. We can’t say they were cited because of that. The full list across every question is in which websites AI cites.

One caution on method. We asked through the API. Perplexity’s Pro Search page contrasts standard search (“1–2 sources”) with Pro Search (“dozens of sources”), so the app your buyers use may cite more or fewer sites than our API answers did.

Does Perplexity use Bing’s index?

The Perplexity pages linked in this guide don’t say it does. On Sep 30, 2026, 4 of the 9 answers said it relies on Bing. None of those pages says so, and the engineering post describes its own index and its own crawler. It says PerplexityBot “complies with explicit limits set forth in robots.txt files”.

Being in Bing is still worth it for its own sake. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, which “shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations”. It doesn’t cover Perplexity. If you want Bing to hear about new pages quickly, IndexNow is Bing’s way to tell it about new or changed pages.

Do reviews, Reddit and fresh pages matter to Perplexity?

The answers said so, and we can’t confirm it. Reviews came up in 6 of the 9 answers, keeping pages updated or fresh in 6, and Reddit in 4.

What we can check is thin. Pro Search lists “forums” among the places it draws from. The engineering post describes keeping Perplexity’s index fresh, which isn’t the same as preferring newer pages in answers, so we don’t treat those as one claim. None of the Perplexity pages linked here says reviews or Reddit posts decide which sources get cited.

Our own position is smaller. We date every number on this site, so you can see how old it is. We don’t post on Reddit yet, so we have no Reddit tactics to give you.

What about schema markup and llms.txt?

The Perplexity pages linked here don’t mention either for citations, and we make no claim either way. 6 of the 9 answers recommended schema or structured data, and 1 recommended an llms.txt file. Not one of those Perplexity pages mentions either.

For what the studies show, read our post on schema and llms.txt.

How do I get my business cited by AI, and know if it worked?

Ask your buyers’ questions, each 3 ways, and read the numbered sources Perplexity shows. Write down whether your site is cited, then repeat on a schedule. That is the same method we use on ourselves.

You can do it by hand. How to check if ChatGPT mentions your business walks through the method, and why we ask each question 3 ways explains why one answer isn’t enough: AI answers vary from one asking to the next.

Our own status: answersky.com was cited 0 times in the answers to this question on Sep 30, 2026. We check ChatGPT and Perplexity every week and write the results on our log. A change counts only after it holds for 2 weeks.

We track cited and named status separately, and watch for both. Neither is something we can promise.

Free Quick Scan: 6 of your buyers’ questions on ChatGPT and Perplexity, 12 answers, and who AI named instead of you. Report within 3 business days. See pricing.