How Perplexity builds an answer
- Perplexity runs searches for the question, reads the top results and writes an answer with citations.
- It favours recent, specific pages that answer the question directly.
- Forums, review sites and publisher articles appear often in its sources.
- Follow up questions refine the answer with new searches.
Let it read your site
Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to index pages for its answers, and Perplexity-User when a user asks it to read a page. Allow both in robots.txt and make sure your firewall does not block them.
How to get recommended in Perplexity
- 1Allow PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.
- 2Find the questions where Perplexity cites competitors and not you.
- 3Study the cited pages: their format, depth and freshness.
- 4Publish pages that answer those questions better, with dates, facts and sources.
- 5Get mentioned in the third party pages it cites most for your category.
- 6Re-check every week, because Perplexity reflects changes quickly.
Measure it properly
Perplexity answers change from one run to the next, and by country, language and wording. One chat is not a trend. Track the same set of buyer questions every week, run each more than once, and look at the share of answers that name you, the position you appear in, and the sources cited. Variask does this for Perplexity and every other major AI engine.