How to get your business cited by Perplexity
Perplexity searches the web for almost every question and shows the pages it used as numbered sources. To be cited, its crawler, PerplexityBot, has to be able to read your site, and your pages need to answer the question clearly and recently. For local questions it also leans on the same signals as other AI tools: consistent business details, reviews, and mentions on other sites.
How Perplexity builds an answer
Unlike a chatbot answering from memory, Perplexity runs a search for the question, reads a set of pages, and writes an answer with citations next to each claim. Because the sources are visible, it's easy to see who gets used, and to check whether you're one of them.
Who does Invisalign near Didsbury?
Parrs Wood Dental Studio is an Invisalign provider and lists treatment from £2,950 with a free consultation1. Brook Street Dental Care also offers clear aligners2, and Didsbury Village Dental mentions Invisalign on its treatments page3.
Make sure it can read you
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler for its search index; Perplexity-User fetches pages when a person asks about a specific link. Check both are allowed in robots.txt, and check your firewall too: hosting and CDN security settings often block bots they don't recognise, whatever robots.txt says.
Give it something to cite
Perplexity cites passages, so pages that state facts in plain sentences do best:
- One page per service or question, answering it in the first paragraph.
- Specifics: prices or price ranges, areas covered, turnaround times, qualifications.
- A visible "last updated" date on pages where things change.
- Consistent details on your Google profile and directories, which Perplexity may cite instead of your site.
Written by the Get Recommended team, run by Atlas Labs. We check these guides against each AI tool's own documentation and update them when it changes.
Questions
Can I see why Perplexity cited a competitor?
Usually, yes. Open the numbered sources under its answer: they're the pages it used. Comparing their pages with yours is one of the quickest ways to see what's missing.
My robots.txt allows PerplexityBot but I'm never cited. Why?
Check your firewall or CDN settings, which can block it regardless of robots.txt. Our free crawler checker tests this. If it can reach you, the gap is usually content: no page that answers the question directly.