How to Get Cited by Perplexity AI
Perplexity doesn't just generate answers — it shows its sources. Here's how to make sure your site is one of them.
Why Perplexity Is Different
Unlike ChatGPT or Claude which generate answers purely from training data, Perplexity searches the live web and cites the sources it used. This means your website can appear as a citation even if it was published yesterday.
Perplexity's crawler is called PerplexityBot. You can check if it's visiting your site in your server logs or Google Search Console.
What Perplexity Looks For
Clear, structured content
Perplexity favors pages with clear headings, bullet points, and well-organized information over long unstructured walls of text.
Fresh content
Pages that are recently updated rank higher in Perplexity's index. Stale content gets buried.
Factual accuracy
Perplexity cross-references multiple sources. Pages with verifiable facts and specific numbers get cited more often.
llms.txt file
Having an llms.txt helps Perplexity understand your site structure and what queries you're relevant for.
Schema markup
JSON-LD structured data helps Perplexity's algorithm categorize and rank your content for relevant queries.
Fast loading
Perplexity's crawler has a timeout. Slow pages may not be fully indexed.
Quick Win
Make sure your robots.txt file explicitly allows PerplexityBot. Some sites accidentally block it with overly aggressive bot-blocking rules.
# robots.txt User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /