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How do I get cited by Perplexity?

By Jason Burns, Founder of HurcuLeads · Stuff Doer at Adolicious · Updated

Get cited by Perplexity by allowing its crawler (PerplexityBot) in robots.txt, publishing server-rendered pages with a clear direct answer as the first sentence under each heading, and making the underlying URL rank on Bing — because Perplexity retrieves against public web indexes and its own crawl.

Perplexity's crawler documentation lists PerplexityBot as its web-fetch user agent, along with a separate Perplexity-User agent used when a user's query triggers a live fetch. A site that blocks either in robots.txt will not appear as a Perplexity citation on that path.

The public "How Perplexity works" FAQ describes the product as retrieval-augmented generation on open-web content, with citations shown for the sources it used. That makes classic web-visibility signals (indexing, on-page relevance, authoritative external links) the primary drivers of inclusion.

Practical steps: allow PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, ship server-rendered HTML so the first fetch returns the answer text, mark up the page with Article or FAQPage JSON-LD, and submit URLs via IndexNow so Bing (a common retrieval backend) sees them immediately.

Track appearances by searching Perplexity for your target questions and reviewing the source strip. Perplexity does not publish a webmaster analytics product; measurement is manual or through third-party monitors.

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Related questions people ask next

  • How do AI assistants choose which sources to cite?

    Grounded AI assistants choose sources by running a retrieval query against a search index, ranking the returned pages using traditional relevance and authority signals, and then having the model select the passages it can quote with the highest attribution confidence.

  • How should robots.txt handle AI crawlers?

    Handle AI crawlers in robots.txt by explicitly listing each user agent — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended — and setting Allow or Disallow per bot to match your policy on training, search citation, and live-fetch use.

  • What is IndexNow and why does it matter for ChatGPT?

    IndexNow is an open protocol jointly announced by Microsoft Bing and Yandex that lets a site push new or changed URLs to participating search engines in near real time — and it matters for ChatGPT because ChatGPT Search's live web results are anchored on Bing's index.

  • Does server-side rendering matter for AI crawlers?

    Server-side rendering matters for AI crawlers because most of them fetch a page's raw HTML once and do not execute JavaScript — a client-rendered page returns an empty shell on that fetch, so the answer text is invisible to the crawler even when the site works perfectly for a browser.