Perplexity puts citations in the foreground: the answer is written around links rather than followed by them. Here is what Perplexity documents about the crawlers behind that — and what it does not.
What this surface is
Perplexity is an answer engine: a question goes in and a written answer comes out with numbered links to the pages it drew on. Attribution is part of the interface rather than an optional extra.
That makes it the surface where a citation is most visible to the reader — and the one where being named without being linked is most conspicuous.
How it differs from a results page
A search engine ranks documents; Perplexity composes an answer and shows its working. The contest is to be one of a handful of sources behind a paragraph, not to occupy a row on a page.
It also fetches pages in two different situations — as a crawler building its own index, and on demand because a person asked something — and it documents those as different agents with different rules.
What the vendor documents
Each line below is read from the linked document. Nothing in this section comes from our own testing or from a third-party estimate.
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the agent that surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results, and states that it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Source: Perplexity — Perplexity Crawlers (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Perplexity documents a second agent, Perplexity-User, for pages fetched because a person asked a question, and states that it generally ignores robots.txt rules because the fetch is user-triggered.
Source: Perplexity — Perplexity Crawlers (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Perplexity publishes IP ranges for its agents, so a site owner can verify that a request really came from Perplexity rather than trusting a user-agent string that anyone can copy.
Source: Perplexity — Perplexity Crawlers (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Crawler rules are expressed in robots.txt, the Robots Exclusion Protocol standardised as RFC 9309, which defines how those rules are written and matched.
Source: IETF — RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)
What is not documented
These are open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering them with a precise number is guessing.
- Perplexity does not publish how it ranks the pages it retrieves, or how it decides which of them a given paragraph cites.
- The product has several modes with different retrieval depth. A result observed in one mode is not evidence about another, and we do not present it as such.
- Being crawled says nothing about being cited. Verifying that a request came from Perplexity is useful for your logs and nothing more.
What GetCited.me measures here
We run your saved questions through Perplexity on a schedule and record the same four things we record everywhere: whether your brand was named, which source URLs the answer linked, which competitors shared the answer with you, and the sentiment of the mention.
Because Perplexity always shows links, the gap between being mentioned and being cited is unusually easy to see here — and that gap is the part you can act on.
Perplexity tracking is part of the Growth and Scale plans; Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so paid plans cannot be purchased right now and every account runs on Launch.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this surface
No account, no card — results in the browser.