Perplexity has become a meaningful “answer engine” alongside traditional search. Independent estimates put it at ~15–22+ million monthly active users and ~500–780 million monthly queries. Market-share trackers also show Perplexity as a visible player in the chatbot/search space.
Takeaway: You don’t need a Perplexity-only strategy, but pages that are fresh, well-sourced, and authoritative tend to surface more often in Perplexity answers—making “Perplexity-readiness” a useful by-product of good content ops. Perplexity positions itself as a real-time web search + AI synthesis engine that always shows citations. Perplexity AI
How Perplexity appears to select and show sources
Perplexity isn’t transparent about ranking weights, but its help docs and product materials emphasize three patterns:
- Recency & live web retrieval. Perplexity runs real-time searches (especially with Pro Search) and synthesizes across “diverse, high-quality sources.” Practically, recent, updated pages are more discoverable. Perplexity AI
- Source transparency. Every answer includes citations linking to the originals; this visibly rewards pages with clear authorship and verifiable claims. Perplexity AI
- Publisher relationships. Perplexity has an expanding Publisher Program (e.g., Le Monde, LA Times, Adweek) and revenue-share pilots, signaling a bias toward reputable outlets with ongoing content operations. Reuters
What about backlinks? Perplexity does not say it uses link signals as traditional search engines do. Given its retrieval-and-synthesis approach, we should assume topical relevance, credibility, and freshness matter more than raw link volume. Treat link building as a by-product of reputation—not a primary lever for Perplexity visibility. (No official weighting available.)
What SEOs should actually do
1) Publish “answer-ready” pages.
- Put the clear answer, sources, and author up-front; keep sections scannable with tight headings and summaries.
- Maintain freshness with update stamps and periodic revisions on fast-moving topics. Perplexity AI
2) Strengthen source credibility signals.
- Use real bylines, About pages, and outbound citations to high-quality references—these map well to Perplexity’s visible citation model. Perplexity AI
3) Cover topics comprehensively.
- Build topic hubs (pillar + cluster) so your site is an obvious “one-stop” source when Perplexity aggregates across domains. (This also benefits classic SEO.)
4) Make inclusion possible (or block it, if you choose).
- If you want to appear: allow PerplexityBot/Perplexity-User in
robots.txtand don’t block its published IP ranges/WAF rules. If you don’t want inclusion, disallow those agents and enforce via firewall. Perplexity
5) Track impact sanely.
- Expect referral traffic from Perplexity (and from publishers it partners with), but also indirect impact when users click the cited sources. Use analytics filters and campaign tagging on “as-seen-in” posts to attribute effects.
Crawling controversies & publisher deals
In August 2025, Cloudflare and others accused Perplexity of “stealth crawling” blocked sites (e.g., ignoring robots.txt, rotating IPs, impersonating a browser UA). Perplexity disputes parts of these reports, but Cloudflare delisted it as a verified bot. At the same time, Perplexity announced expanded publisher partnerships and revenue-share pilots—signaling a push toward more formal content licensing. Whether and how your content is used may depend on your bot policy and any publisher agreements
