Track Your Brand and Sources in Perplexity

Perplexity is built around citations. Its answers are short and lean heavily on a handful of sources, each tied to a numbered reference in the text. That changes what visibility means:

• If your website is a cited source, you influence the answer even when your brand isn't named.
• If the sources Perplexity trusts for your category don't mention you, you're unlikely to be recommended.
• The cited sources for a question are a practical to-do list: they show exactly where your business needs to be described well.

Perplexity returns its search results with IDs, and the answer refers to them with numbered markers. We map each marker to the exact search result Perplexity returned, so every cited link is one Perplexity really used — nothing is parsed out of the answer's prose.

• Cited in the answer — sources behind a numbered reference.
• Searched only — results Perplexity retrieved but didn't cite.
• Source type — your own site, a competitor's site, or a third party.

Across repeated checks you see which domains Perplexity cites most for your questions, and whether your own site starts appearing.

Alongside sources, each answer is checked for your brand (name, aliases and domain) and classified as a direct recommendation, a mention without recommendation, a citation only, or not mentioned. When Perplexity lists options, your position in that list is recorded.

Businesses Perplexity recommends in your tracked answers are recorded as competitors, verified against the answer text. Because Perplexity often cites a competitor's own site, the sources view also shows which competitors are winning on source visibility, not just on mentions.

Perplexity answers change as its search results change. Pro asks your questions every 7 days and keeps every answer, so you can see whether new sources appear, old ones drop out, and whether you move from absent to cited to recommended. Pro is launching soon.

The same questions are checked on ChatGPT and Perplexity, so you can compare engines side by side: being recommended by one and absent from another is common, and useful to know.

• Questions go through Perplexity's official Agent API with Perplexity's live web search.
• The answer is written by the model behind Perplexity's "fast" API preset, and the model that answered is stored with each result.
• Answers on perplexity.ai can differ (different models, settings and personalisation). Reports say this clearly.
• If Perplexity fails for a question, other engines' results are still kept; the failure is shown, not hidden.