What Perplexity tells buyers about you

The one engine on this list that reliably sends you traffic, because it shows its sources and people click them.

We read: API + web search · checked 2026-08

How people actually use Perplexity

As a search engine rather than a chat. Shorter queries, read quickly, and read by somebody who expects to check the answer, which is why every claim in it arrives with a numbered source attached.
They click the sources. This is the difference that matters commercially: on the other four, being in the answer is the whole prize, and here being in the answer can also be a visit.
It is heavily used by people researching in order to write something: a shortlist, a comparison, a recommendation for a colleague. Being the source they cite gets you quoted a second time, in a document we never see.

Where its answers come from

Perplexity · API + web search

The API with web search switched on, declared on every result. The same honesty applies as to the others: what we read is the API, not somebody’s browser tab, and we do not claim the two are identical. What we can say about this engine is that its habit of citing sources is not something we have to infer. The citations come back with the answer, so whether your domain was used as a source is a fact we read rather than a judgement we make.

This is stated on every result you get, not only here. See how the score is calculated.

What we measure, and what counts as good

Every answer Perplexity gives is graded on the same four-step scale as every other engine, so your columns are comparable. The scale is ordinal and every step carries a word and a mark as well as a shade — nothing here is colour alone.

AbsentYou are not in the answer at all
NamedMentioned, one of several
RecommendedAI tells them to choose you
CitedYour site is the source it quotes
Predates your last change

What to expect on Perplexity

Cited is the verdict to chase here, and unlike the others it is genuinely within reach, because this engine shows its working by design. That cuts the other way too: a merely named result is worth less here than the same word elsewhere, because the reader can see exactly who was cited instead of you, and can click straight through to them.

What moves this engine

In the order worth doing them. These are checks from the scan itself, not general advice. Each one is graded on your site and each one comes with the change written out.

1Let AI systems read your websiteIf ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot fetch your pages when someone asks about you, nothing else on this list matters.about 2 minutes
2Give AI systems a guide to your siteAn emerging convention, weighted low on purpose: adoption is real but not yet decisive.about 10 minutes
3Answer your customer questionsEngines lift sentences that answer the question directly. Pages that describe the company instead get skipped in favour of a competitor who simply says the price.about 120 minutes
4Answer more of the questions customers askAnswer-first content is what gets quoted. Prose that buries the answer in paragraph four does not.about 45 minutes

15 checks run on your website in total, and the scan reports every one of them. These are the ones that matter most for this engine.

What we will not tell you

What share of your customers use Perplexity. Nobody can measure that for your business, ourselves included, and a percentage invented to sound authoritative is worse than no number at all. Your scorecard shows each engine separately so you can weigh them against what you know about your own buyers.
That we can guarantee an answer changes. We can tell you what it says today, what the engines cite instead of you, and which specific things about your site are stopping them. Then we re-scan and show you the before and the after. Anyone promising a position is selling you something they do not control.
That a single scan settles it. These answers move. One reading is a snapshot, which is why the licence includes a re-scan and why monitoring exists as something you can add rather than something we pretend one scan already is.

Common questions

Being cited sounds better than being recommended. Which is it?

Cited is the top verdict, and on this engine it is worth the most in practice as well as on paper, because a citation here is a link somebody can press. The four verdicts are ordered the same way on every engine so the scores stay comparable. What changes between engines is how realistic each one is, which is what the note above is for.

Does an llms.txt file actually do anything?

It is a plain text file that tells AI systems, in words, what your site is and which pages matter. It is a convention rather than a standard anyone is obliged to honour, and we do not claim otherwise. It costs about ten minutes, it cannot hurt, and the Fix Pack writes yours from your own crawled pages, with your real services and your real prices, or with nothing where you have not published one.

My competitor is cited and I am not. What is the actual difference?

Usually one of three things, and your scorecard says which. Their pages can be read by the crawlers and yours cannot. Their pages answer the question in text that can be lifted as a quote, and yours answer it in a picture, a PDF or a form. Or they are listed on the directories this engine keeps citing for your trade, and you are not. All three are fixable, and the first is normally the whole story.

The other engines

The quickest way to find out is to look at your own result.

Scan my site free

Perplexity is a trade mark of its owner. MentionMachine is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to it, and the mark drawn beside its name on this page is our own. What is described here about how Perplexity behaves was last checked 2026-08; if something on this page is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.