How to Get Cited by Perplexity: Its Rules and Our Data

From September 1 to October 17, Google Analytics recorded 46 sessions from Perplexity on the three content sites we run. ChatGPT sent 1,176 in the same 47 days, and that's with most of its visits on about October 9 to 14 arriving unlabelled. Perplexity sent at least one visit on 31 of the 47 days, and never more than 3 in a day. These are clicks: GA4 can't see the times Perplexity cites a page and nobody clicks.

That's a trickle, and we'd rather start there than with a promise. Getting cited by Perplexity costs little: a robots.txt line, a firewall setting and, in our view, pages that answer the question in plain text. Perplexity documents the access part. For the rest, we have outside counts and our own numbers.

What Perplexity says its crawlers need

Perplexity's crawler page lists two agents and treats them differently. PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." The page goes on: "To ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site's robots.txt file and permitting requests from our published IP ranges listed below."

The second agent, Perplexity-User, fetches a page while someone is asking: "When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response." Perplexity adds: "Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules." Changes to robots.txt "may take up to 24 hours" to show up on its side.

So a robots.txt block on PerplexityBot mostly keeps you out of the search results Perplexity links from, while the per-question fetcher may still read your page. A firewall or CDN block is different: it can stop Perplexity-User too, and Perplexity's page asks firewall users to allow both agents. If you want to be cited, we'd allow both.

One detail catches people out, and it caught us. A robots.txt group named for one crawler replaces the general one. The standard, RFC 9309, says a crawler obeys the group that matches its name: "If no matching group exists, crawlers MUST obey the group with a user-agent line with the "*" value, if present." Our three sites each have a PerplexityBot group that says only "Allow: /", so under the standard, the Disallow lines we wrote for everyone else, like our admin paths, don't apply to it. If you add a group for PerplexityBot, copy your Disallow lines into it.

Check your CDN, not only robots.txt

Perplexity's crawler page says that behind a web application firewall "you may need to explicitly whitelist Perplexity's bots to ensure they can access your content," and gives steps for Cloudflare and AWS that match both the user agent and its published IP ranges.

Cloudflare changed its defaults this year. Its July 1, 2026 changelog splits AI crawlers into "Search, Agent, and Training" and says that from "September 15, 2026, new domains onboarding to Cloudflare receive updated defaults: Bots classified as Training or as Agent are blocked on pages that display ads, while Search remains allowed." If your site is on Cloudflare, look up how it classifies both Perplexity agents and what your AI crawler settings block before assuming they can read your pages. On any CDN, the firewall log is where a blocked PerplexityBot shows up.

Where Perplexity's citations come from

Perplexity's help center says it "searches the internet, gathering information from authoritative sources like articles, websites, and journals," and that "Each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources." To see which sources it cites in practice, we rely on outside counts like Ahrefs'.

Ahrefs' figures come from its Brand Radar tool, covering "over 3.1 million US queries spanning all topics" in September 2026; Ahrefs updates the list monthly, so later months may differ. The share is each site's citations "as a percentage of the summed citations of the top 50 most-cited sources," so it says nothing about the long tail where most small sites sit. Still, two platforms take 42.4% of the top 50's citations between them.

We read that as a second route in. When your own page isn't the one cited, a useful answer on Reddit or a video on YouTube that names your business can be. That only works if it's honest: answer as yourself, say who you are, and follow each community's rules on promotion.

Expect the answers to move. On r/SEO on October 11, u/bediseoexpert, who says they've worked in SEO since 2010 and built the tracking tool they used, asked five AI systems the same 16 buying questions for an electrician near Vancouver every morning for 32 days, with Perplexity added for only about the last two weeks. On the same morning, the overlap between pairs of systems ranged "from 40% (AI Mode vs Perplexity) to 63% (AI Mode vs AI Overviews)." Their takeaway: "a single "we're #1 in ChatGPT" screenshot means very little. Rates over weeks, per AI system, are the only numbers I'd put in a client report." The post had 9 points when we read it.

What Perplexity sent our sites

Our sites are a manhwa and anime site, a game news site and a card game site, all ours, not clients'. They report to one GA4 property, and we pulled sessions by source, medium and channel through the GA4 Data API on October 19. The table covers September 1 to October 17, because GA4 didn't yet have all of October 18 when we pulled the numbers.

Of the 46 Perplexity sessions, 32 went to the manhwa site, 8 to the game news site and 6 to the card game site. The manhwa site also gets most of our ChatGPT visits (808 of 1,176). With 46 visits, we wouldn't read more into it than that.

GA4 split them across two channels. Only 10 arrived as "perplexity.ai / ai-assistant" and landed in the AI Assistant channel. The other 36 arrived with the source "perplexity" and no medium, and GA4 filed them under Unassigned. Google's definition of the AI Assistant channel names "sources like ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot, or Grok"; Perplexity isn't on that list, though its perplexity.ai referrals were counted there. We can't tell from GA4 what sets the bare "perplexity" source. Either way, a report built on the AI Assistant channel alone would have shown us 10 Perplexity visits instead of 46. To see all of them, open Explore, start a Free form exploration, add Session source as a dimension and Sessions as a metric, and filter Session source to contain "perplexity".

What to do this week

• Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt, and copy your Disallow lines into its group if you give it one
• Check your CDN or firewall for blocked PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User requests, and allow them if you want to be cited
• Put the answer to each buyer question in plain text near the top of the page that targets it (our view)
• Answer real questions where your buyers ask them, on Reddit or YouTube, as yourself and within each community's rules
• In GA4, build an exploration filtered on session source containing "perplexity" instead of relying on the AI Assistant channel
• Ask Perplexity your ten most important buyer questions every week and log whether you're cited

How we handle Perplexity for a client

The robots.txt and page-structure parts are among the technical fixes we make in the first month of our plan ($500, with an SEO and GEO audit, site design and a content plan). After that, $300 a month covers up to 30 articles, ongoing fixes, hosting and a monthly report with your Search Console clicks and impressions. Our sample report is filled in with one of our own sites. We don't promise citations or AI visits; the one result our terms promise is about Google clicks. The AI search optimization page lists what we set up for AI answers, and our posts on getting mentioned in ChatGPT and tracking ChatGPT traffic in GA4 cover the other assistant that sends us visits.

How we know this

Written by Tyler Phan. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 20, 2026.

1. Perplexity, Perplexity Crawlers (PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User), accessed Oct 19, 2026
2. Perplexity Help Center, How does Perplexity work?, accessed Oct 19, 2026
3. Cloudflare changelog, New options to manage AI traffic (July 1, 2026), accessed Oct 19, 2026
4. RFC 9309, Robots Exclusion Protocol (section 2.2.1, the user-agent line), accessed Oct 19, 2026
5. Ahrefs, The 50 Most-Cited Websites in Perplexity (September 2026 data), accessed Oct 19, 2026
6. r/SEO, I tracked 1,814 AI answers for one local business over 32 days (post by u/bediseoexpert), accessed Oct 19, 2026
7. Analytics Help, [GA4] Default channel group (AI Assistant definition), accessed Oct 19, 2026
8. Elmrank, GA4 sessions from AI assistants by source, medium and channel for the three sites we own (Data API, Sep 1 to Oct 17, 2026, pulled Oct 19); the sites are on our use cases page, accessed Oct 19, 2026

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