Perplexity SEO is making your pages the ones Perplexity AI search cites. Perplexity searches the web for every answer and shows numbered citations, so it is the most transparent AI engine to work on: you can see exactly which sources it chose, and whether yours was one of them.
What Perplexity SEO means
Perplexity AI search reads the web and writes an answer with numbered citations that link to the original sources[2]. Its CEO put the scale at 780 million queries in May 2025[4]. For a site owner, that means two jobs: let Perplexity’s crawler reach you, and be the kind of source it cites for your buyers’ questions.
PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User
Perplexity documents two bots. PerplexityBot “is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.” Perplexity-User supports user actions: when someone asks a question, it may visit a page to answer it, and because those fetches are user-initiated it “generally ignores robots.txt rules”[1]. Test your own robots.txt:
For every AI crawler at once, use the AI Crawler Checker on your live file, or write new rules with the robots.txt generator.
What Perplexity cites most
| reddit.com | 21.6% |
|---|---|
| youtube.com | 20.8% |
| en.wikipedia.org | 6.3% |
| facebook.com | 4.5% |
| amazon.com | 3.6% |
Two community platforms account for over 40% of those citations[3]. The lesson is the same as for ChatGPT: the pages that decide whether Perplexity recommends you are often threads and videos about your category, not your own site. The Reddit SEO guide covers how to take part without spamming.
Perplexity and publishers
Sources, in order[5][6][8][7].
How to get cited by Perplexity
Measuring Perplexity visibility
Because Perplexity always shows its sources, it is the easiest AI engine to measure. CoreCited runs your tracked prompts through Perplexity every week and stores the cited URLs, so citation analysis can show which domains Perplexity cites for your questions and which ones name competitors but never you. Visits from Perplexity show up in analytics from perplexity.ai; the GA4 guide shows how to count them.
Questions people ask
How does Perplexity choose its sources?
Perplexity has not published how it ranks sources. It says it searches the web, reads the results and writes an answer with numbered citations linking to the original sources. What can be measured is the result: in Ahrefs' September 2026 data, Reddit and YouTube were Perplexity's most-cited websites.
Should I allow PerplexityBot?
If you want to appear in Perplexity's answers, yes. Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its search results, and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Blocking it keeps your site out of those links.
What is Perplexity-User?
The fetcher Perplexity uses when a person's question needs a specific page. Perplexity says that because these fetches are user-initiated, Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules.
Does Perplexity train on my content?
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. It is a search crawler, which is why blocking it removes you from Perplexity's results rather than from a training set.
How is Perplexity SEO different from Google SEO?
Perplexity runs its own crawler and index and shows numbered sources on every search answer, so you can see exactly who it cites. Much of the craft is shared: crawlable pages, clear answers, and being covered by the sites Perplexity already trusts.
How many people use Perplexity?
Perplexity does not publish monthly users. Its CEO said it handled 780 million queries in May 2025, growing more than 20% a month at the time.