Perplexity: how your business gets cited with sources

Perplexity differs from ChatGPT and Gemini by showing its sources openly in every answer, often with clickable footnotes. Getting cited there mainly requires two things: your content being fresh and easily accessible for real-time search, and being structured clearly enough to be picked out as a reliable source among several.

Perplexity searches in real time, every time

Unlike models that primarily answer from training data, Perplexity performs an actual search for most questions and builds its answer directly from the pages it finds there and then. That means old, outdated content is rarely cited, no matter how good it once was. It also means a change to your website can affect Perplexity's answers much faster than answers from models without real-time search.

The footnotes favor concrete, citable sentences

Because Perplexity shows a direct source reference for each factual claim, it favors sentences that can be cited precisely and stand on their own. Vague phrasing or long chains of reasoning are harder to tie to a single source. Short, concrete claims, ideally with a figure or a date, are easier for Perplexity to attribute to your page specifically.

Structure and freshness beat volume

You don't need large amounts of content to get cited in Perplexity. You need a handful of pages that answer a question precisely, are kept up to date, and are clearly structured with headings and short paragraphs. A page last updated three years ago typically loses out to a newer page, even if the older page was originally more thorough.

Five sources is enough to be seen

Perplexity rarely cites just one source per answer. It typically pulls three to five pages and weaves an answer together from them, often from different types of websites to cover the question from multiple angles. Your goal isn't to dominate the whole answer, but to be one of the pages picked out. That makes the bar lower than many think: you don't need to be the only or the most comprehensive source, just one of the most precise.

What if you haven't published anything recently?

If your website hasn't been updated in a long time, it's not too late to start. Even a simple update, like refreshing dates, prices and a handful of sentences on your most visited pages, can be enough for Perplexity to start treating the page as a current source again on the next search.

Make it easy to be found

Make sure crawlers are actually allowed to read your website, and consider an llms.txt file if you have a lot of content to guide a model through. Our free llms.txt generator builds the file automatically from the pages on your website.

• Keep dates and facts up to date, especially prices and opening hours.
• Write short, concrete sentences that can be cited on their own.
• Make sure your website is fast and accessible to crawling.
• Publish an llms.txt if you have a lot of content to structure.