How to show up in Perplexity: why it names some brands and not others
Perplexity is the most transparent of the four: it always searches and puts numbered sources next to the text. That makes it the place where you can see most clearly which pages carry weight in your industry.
How does Perplexity decide which brands to name?
Perplexity searches the web for every question and builds the answer by citing the pages it has read, numbered next to the text. The brands it names come from those pages.
Of the four engines, it's the one that takes the least guesswork: the link between what it says and where it got it is right there, source by source, in the answer itself.
That makes it very useful for diagnosis. If Perplexity always cites the same five domains in your industry, you already know where the conversation is happening and where you're missing from it.
The internal logic it uses to choose and rank those sources isn't public, so we're not going to describe it as if it were.
If half of these terms are new to you, they are all explained in the glossary.
What can you do to show up more in Perplexity?
Be on the domains Perplexity already cites for questions in your industry, and publish pages that answer the question right at the top, with specific data.
See what it's citing today
It's the engine where the map shows up first. The report collects the domains being cited in your industry, and that list is the work plan: either you get onto those sites or you become a source yourself.
Answer at the top, with numbers
A paragraph with the direct answer at the start, and the detail below it with prices, timelines, requirements or whatever applies. What can be pulled out in one sentence is what ends up getting cited.
One page per question
Five pages that answer five specific questions are better than one long page that touches on all of them in passing. The engine searches by question, not by section of your site.
Make sure it can get in
Perplexity declares two separate agents. If either one is blocked in your robots.txt, part of the loop is cut and you don't even find out.
How do we measure it?
We send it your set of buying questions and read the answers along with their sources. The specific model we query for Perplexity is perplexity/sonar, Perplexity's own search model.
Model we query for Perplexity
perplexity/sonar
Via OpenRouter. It searches the web by default and returns its citations natively, with no plugins added on top. Even so, it's the API, not the consumer app.
This is the cleanest case of the four, and we say so just as we say the opposite when that's the case: Sonar is Perplexity's own search model, it searches by default and returns its citations natively. There's no need to add a search plugin on top of it here.
That said, it isn't the Perplexity app either: we query it through its API via OpenRouter, and an API doesn't necessarily behave the same as the web interface or offer the same answer modes.
If that model fails, the fallback for Perplexity is perplexity/sonar-pro: always one of Perplexity's own models.
The citations it returns are what feed the part of the report where we tell you which domains are being used as sources in your industry.
Does your site let Perplexity in?
It depends on your robots.txt. Perplexity declares two agents with different roles: one indexes, and the other visits at the moment it's answering someone.
- PerplexityBotIndexes your site for Perplexity's answers.
- Perplexity-UserVisits your site when answering a user.
Blocking one of the two leaves the loop half done, and from the outside you can't tell: the site keeps working the same for people. The checker reviews them separately and shows you the exact line in your robots.txt that decides each case.
Check my site for freeDo you show up, or does your competitor?
The free check runs 6 buying questions through Perplexity and the other three engines, and shows you how many times you show up, in what position and who shows up in your place. No card required.
I want my free diagnosis