Perplexity answers by searching in real time and citing the sources it used, and it leans on community and review sources more than any other major engine. The bottom line: Perplexity operates two crawlers with different roles, its citations skew toward Reddit and review sites, its commercial answers lean on comparison and review sources, and getting referenced means allowing its crawler, publishing structured comparison and pricing content, and having an honest presence where its answers look.

New to the term? What is answer engine optimization covers the basics.

How Perplexity retrieves

Perplexity documents two crawlers: PerplexityBot, which builds its search index, and Perplexity-User, which fetches pages when a user asks about them. Its own claim, reported in a 2026 citation review, is an index of more than 200 billion URLs. Perplexity has said Perplexity-User is an agent and generally does not follow robots.txt, which has caused disputes with publishers, so robots.txt controls PerplexityBot reliably and the user fetcher less so. Perplexity's Sonar models combine real time web search with generation and return citations, and the same search capability is available through its API.

Which sources it favors

FindingSource
Reddit makes up about 46.7% of Perplexity's top source share, the highest concentration of any domain on any major platformProfound analysis of 680 million citations, via 5WPR
Reddit is 6.6% of Perplexity's total citationsProfound
Most cited commercial domains include G2, Gartner, NerdWallet, PCMag, TripAdvisor, and YelpProfound, via 5WPR
Reddit and LinkedIn were among the top five most cited domains on Perplexity in 2025Semrush three month study

Citation studies disagree because they sample different questions on different days, so use them for the shape: forums, review aggregators, and news, not exact percentages.

Steps to be referenced

  1. Allow PerplexityBot. Check robots.txt and any firewall or bot protection.
  2. Publish structured comparison, pricing, and how it works pages. Commercial questions pull comparison content.
  3. Complete review profiles. On the review sites your category uses.
  4. Take part in community threads honestly. As a named person, following each community's rules, with disclosure. Undisclosed promotion is removed and can harm your reputation.
  5. Keep content fresh. Ahrefs found Perplexity and Gemini show a strong recency preference, though less than ChatGPT.
  6. Measure. Run a fixed question set five times in Perplexity and record which sources are cited alongside or instead of you.

Questions people ask

How does Perplexity choose which websites to reference?

It searches in real time and cites sources it used. Its citations skew toward Reddit, review aggregators, and news, and commercial queries lean on comparison and review sites.

What crawlers does Perplexity use?

PerplexityBot builds its search index and Perplexity-User fetches pages on a user's request. Perplexity says the user fetcher generally does not follow robots.txt.

Is Reddit important for Perplexity visibility?

Profound found Reddit is about 46.7 percent of Perplexity's top source share, so honest participation in relevant threads can matter.

How do I see which sources Perplexity cites for my questions?

Run your questions in Perplexity and read the numbered source list beneath each answer, then repeat several times because answers vary.

Sources