How do you get Perplexity to recommend your brand?

Perplexity describes itself as an answer engine: it searches the web, identifies trusted sources and turns what they say into one answer. Its help centre sets out the steps: it works out what the question is asking, searches the internet for information from sources such as articles, websites and journals, puts the most relevant points into an answer, and adds numbered citations linking to the original sources. A language model writes the answer: Perplexity's default model for free and Pro users alike, and for Pro subscribers a choice that includes the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The pages its search can find come from its own crawler, PerplexityBot, which Perplexity says surfaces and links websites in its search results, and from third-party crawlers it partners with to build its index. It says it has updated its agreements with those providers so that they also respect robots.txt, particularly on news publisher sites. When a question needs a particular page, another agent, Perplexity-User, may visit it and link to it in the answer.

How it weighs one source against another is Perplexity's call. Explaining how it picks products, it says its answer engine ranks sources on authority and relevance.

For a brand, that puts the quickest levers on its own side: whether Perplexity's crawler may read the site, and what the site says. A change there can reach an answer once Perplexity reads the page again.

Access is the one Perplexity publishes instructions for. To appear in its search results, it recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from its published IP ranges, and it says a change to robots.txt may take up to 24 hours to reach its systems. Its help centre adds that a blocked page may still leave the domain, a headline and a brief factual summary in its index. If a web application firewall sits in front of the site, Perplexity says its agents may need to be allowed there explicitly, and it publishes configuration steps for common firewalls. Perplexity's agents, and what Perplexity says each is for:

• PerplexityBot. Perplexity publishes it as the crawler that surfaces and links websites in its results, and says it is not used to train foundation models.
• Perplexity-User. Perplexity publishes it as the fetch made when a person's question needs a page. Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt, because a person requested it.

Which crawlers to allow for the other assistants, and why a rule at your network edge can refuse one your file allows, is its own answer.

Then the pages themselves, and here the advice is ours rather than Perplexity's. Buyers usually describe a situation rather than name a product: a small team, a budget, a named use. Answer that situation directly on the page, in a passage that still makes sense read on its own.

And the facts on them. Once PerplexityBot is allowed, your own pages are among what Perplexity's search can read, so a wrong price, date or specification there can reach an answer. Where an answer and your page disagree, the fix can sit on either side. Which of the three to start with depends on where your brand is weakest, though a refused PerplexityBot comes first whatever else is true, and that order has its own answer.

You can see which of those pages Perplexity reads in your own category. Ask a buying question, open the numbered citations, and note the domains: Perplexity says every answer includes citations linking to the original sources, and that for products it analyses reviews across multiple sites. Where the same domains keep coming back on questions a competitor wins and you do not, those domains are where the work goes. Why a competitor comes up first has its own answer.

Those pages sit at different distances from you, and the work changes with the distance:

• A listing you supply. A retailer page, a marketplace listing, a directory profile. You can influence it directly by correcting what you supply, though the page is not yours.
• An independent review or comparison. You can give the writer accurate facts, access to people who can answer questions and, where it fits, the product to try. What they conclude is theirs.
• A forum or community thread. You can answer the question openly, under the brand's own name. The opinion belongs to the people in the thread.

None of it moves on your schedule. A page about you changes when the people who publish it decide to change it.

Open a cited page before acting on what an answer says it supports. Perplexity says that while it aims for accuracy, it encourages readers to double-check sources.

Perplexity sets that out on its shopping help page, answering whether its product listings are sponsored.

When it began experimenting with ads, in the US in November 2024, Perplexity said the content of its answers would not be influenced by advertisers. The formats it described were sponsored follow-up questions and paid media beside an answer, labelled as sponsored, and it said the answer to a sponsored question would still be generated by Perplexity rather than written or edited by the brand that paid for it. The same post calls the programme an experiment whose formats may evolve.

So an ad of the kind it described buys a placement beside an answer, not a place in it. A brand the answer leaves out is still left out, whatever sits beside it, so a report that counts sponsored placements and recommendations together overstates how often the brand is recommended.

The variation is large. In Delphi's study of answers collected up to 24 August 2026, an assistant asked the same question more than once inside one measurement named the identical set of companies 21.5% of the time. A before and after built from one answer each compares two draws, and it can show a gain or a loss that nothing caused. How much evidence a change needs has its own answer.

The free check by hand is written for ChatGPT and works the same way here: it sets out which questions to ask and what to write down for each answer, and comparing a before with an after adds to what you record each time. Three things are specific to doing it in Perplexity:

• Keep your own history out. Perplexity says it may draw on your saved memories and your past searches when it answers, and that both are always off in incognito mode. Ask in incognito, or switch both off in its Memory settings.
• Keep the model the same. Perplexity says Pro subscribers can choose the model that writes an answer, or leave it on Best, which picks the model it judges most suitable for the question. Ask the before and the after on the same setting.
• Allow for the clock. A robots.txt change can take up to 24 hours to reach Perplexity's systems, as set out above. A rewritten page can only show up once Perplexity reads it again, and a page about you on another site only once its publisher changes it.

Visits show only part of it. An answer that recommends you and sends nobody to your site leaves no visit to count.

The study publishes that figure with the counts behind it and how each was made. A brand's standing in Perplexity is one part of its AI visibility. Some of the work itself carries across and some does not. Accurate pages and third-party coverage are there for any assistant that reads the web. Crawler access is set operator by operator: most publish their own crawler, so allowing PerplexityBot says nothing about the rest.

The same question has its own answer for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok.

Delphi measures them side by side. Each time it measures a brand, it puts the same questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok more than once and keeps every answer word for word. Its score, the Delphi Index, carries a margin set by how far the assistants disagreed with each other on your questions, and the dashboard and the history page do not report a change in the Index smaller than that margin as a change. Each assistant's share of answers naming you is shown beside the others' from one measurement to the next, so a change in Perplexity alone is visible, though that figure carries no margin of its own.

Delphi asks each assistant through its API, the route developers use, rather than through the consumer app. Its questions to Perplexity go to a model that searches the web as it answers, so a change to your pages or crawler settings can show in a Delphi reading of Perplexity once Perplexity has read it. Most of its questions reach ChatGPT without a live web search, and for those a change shows only once a newer model has learned it. Each paid level includes one or two measurements per brand a month. It is not a daily tracker, and an extra measurement costs $49 when a before and after needs one sooner.