Perplexity visibility:
where citation is visible
Perplexity documents that its responses include links to the pages used. That makes it the one major assistant where being cited is directly observable rather than inferred from a score — you can ask a question and read whether you are in the source list. Perplexity also documents two distinct agents: PerplexityBot, which indexes for its search results and is stated not to train models, and Perplexity-User, which handles user-initiated fetches and generally ignores robots.txt because a person triggered it.
A source list you can actually check
Most AI visibility work suffers from an evidence problem: the systems answer in prose, name a few businesses, and expose nothing about why. Perplexity's format narrows that gap, because the pages behind an answer are listed. You can ask the questions your customers ask and see, without a tool, whether your domain appears.
Two cautions before that becomes a strategy. Results vary between runs and between phrasings, so a single check is an anecdote rather than a measurement — which is why OG01 records observed responses as a moment rather than charting them as positions. And being cited is not the same as being cited well: a page can appear as a source and be described in terms you would not have chosen, which is a content problem the citation itself conceals.
What Perplexity publishes about access
- PerplexityBot indexes sites for Perplexity's search results, and Perplexity states it is not used to train models. For a business that wants to be findable there, this is the agent that matters.
- Perplexity-User handles fetches triggered by a person asking a question, and Perplexity states it generally ignores robots.txt for that reason — the same user-initiated distinction other vendors draw.
- Changes take time. Perplexity documents that adjustments to these settings can take up to 24 hours to take effect, which is worth knowing before concluding a change did nothing.
- Responses link their sources. Documented as part of how answers are delivered, and the basis for the observability described above.
What is not published, here as everywhere, is the selection logic: which sources are chosen, in what order, with what weighting. OG01 makes no claim about it and neither should anyone selling you a service.
Be usable as a source, not merely present
A citation-first surface rewards pages that make a specific claim, in plain language, attributable to an identifiable organisation. In practice that means three unglamorous things: the answer exists in the served document rather than after a render; the page states the position rather than circling it; and the business behind the page resolves to one entity so the citation has something coherent to point at.
Corroboration matters here too. A claim supported only by the page making it is a claim a system is less willing to repeat, and repetition is the entire mechanism by which you appear in someone else's answer.
Where the Perplexity facts on this page come from
Summarised from Perplexity's own documentation. Reviewed 2026-09-08.
- Perplexity — Bots documentation — https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
Perplexity questions
Can I just check Perplexity myself instead of buying a reading?
Does blocking PerplexityBot stop Perplexity using my content?
I changed my robots.txt and nothing changed. Is it broken?
We get cited but described inaccurately. Can that be fixed?
Will OG01 guarantee a Perplexity citation?
Free reading, about ninety seconds, no card required.