What is Perplexity SEO?
Also called: Perplexity optimization
Definition
Perplexity SEO is the practice of getting a brand mentioned and its pages cited in answers from Perplexity, an AI answer engine that searches the web for nearly every question. Because Perplexity shows its sources openly, it is one of the easiest engines to study and influence.
Explained
Perplexity runs a web search for each question, reads a set of pages, and writes an answer with numbered citations. Its crawler is called PerplexityBot; blocking it in robots.txt makes your pages much less likely to be used.
What tends to help: pages that rank for the underlying search, clear factual passages that answer the question directly, recent update dates for fast-moving topics, and presence on the review sites and forums Perplexity already cites for your category.
Example
A cybersecurity startup sees Perplexity cite the same two comparison articles for every prompt in its category. It contacts both authors with accurate product details, and within a few weeks starts appearing in some answers.