How to get cited by Perplexity
Perplexity is the most citation-friendly AI engine for small sites. Three conditions get you cited: allow PerplexityBot + Perplexity-Userin robots.txt, ship Organization JSON-LD with a populated sameAs array, and rewrite question-titled pages to lead with the answer. Domain authority barely matters — Perplexity's citation model weights relevance over PageRank.
Run a free Perplexity citability audit. Checks both bots plus the 4 GEO fundamentals.
The Perplexity citation pipeline
Perplexity uses two distinct bots, each with a different job:
- PerplexityBot — the index crawler. Builds Perplexity's permanent corpus of citable URLs. Crawls on a regular schedule.
- Perplexity-User — the runtime crawler. Fires when a user asks a question and Perplexity decides a specific URL is worth fetching live for the answer.
Most accidentally-blocked sites have a User-agent: * + Disallow: /admin pattern that's fine, but added a blanket User-agent: PerplexityBot + Disallow: / later. Removing that pair is the single biggest Perplexity-citation fix.
Robots.txt template for Perplexity
If you want maximum Perplexity citation visibility:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /If you want to be cited but NOT used for training (Perplexity doesn't use crawled content for training, but some operators want the explicit signal anyway), the above is sufficient — neither PerplexityBot nor Perplexity-User feeds training corpora.
FAQ
What crawlers does Perplexity use?
Two bots: PerplexityBot (the index-building crawler that adds your pages to Perplexity's retrieval corpus) and Perplexity-User (the runtime crawler that fetches a URL live when a user asks a question and Perplexity decides to cite it). Both run from the same IP ranges and identify themselves clearly in the User-Agent header. Block either and you opt out of the corresponding behavior — both must be allowed for full citation eligibility.
Does Perplexity cite small sites?
Yes — more readily than any other major AI engine. Perplexity's citation model weights relevance and recency over domain authority, so a 6-month-old blog post on a DR 20 site can be cited alongside a New York Times article if the smaller site directly answers the user's question. This is the practical reason most small-site GEO results materialize on Perplexity first.
How fast does Perplexity pick up new content?
For Perplexity-User (live retrieval): immediately on the next user query. For PerplexityBot (index): usually within 24-72 hours of publish, faster if the URL is referenced from llms.txt or a sitemap that PerplexityBot has already crawled. The lag is shortest for sites that get crawled frequently — high-velocity blogs see <1 day.
Do I need llms.txt for Perplexity?
Not strictly required, but it accelerates indexing and improves which pages Perplexity treats as canonical. Format your llms.txt with section headers grouping pages by topic — Perplexity prefers the structured manifest over raw sitemap parsing because the per-URL descriptions reduce its content-classification work.
How do I check if Perplexity can cite my site?
Three checks: (1) robots.txt allows PerplexityBot + Perplexity-User, (2) Organization JSON-LD on the homepage, (3) answer-first paragraphs on question-titled pages. Run the free Seoxpert GEO audit for an automated check of all three plus 442 other signals.
Audit your Perplexity citability
Free first scan. Checks both Perplexity bots plus the full GEO stack.