In 2024, Perplexity users spent an average of 10.3 minutes per session on websites versus 8.1 minutes for Google users. These people also visited more pages on average: 13 versus 11.8 through Google (Source).
It’s not surprising that Perplexity users are more engaged than Google users:
When users click through to your website from Perplexity, they’ve already asked a question your brand was (part of) the answer to. This makes them much more likely to pay attention and, eventually, make a purchase.
Studies by Ahrefs and Kevin Indig have also shown that Perplexity is the second-largest referrer of AI traffic, following the biggest referrer, ChatGPT (Source 1, Source 2).
Search is diversifying, but this is nothing new. We’ve long been using YouTube and TikTok as search engines for video content, Amazon as a search engine for products, and Booking.com as a search engine for accommodation.
LLM-driven answer engines such as Perplexity are broadening the field even more, offering alternatives to more traditional search engines such as Google and Bing.
As organic clicks drop steadily, you can’t afford to rely only on Google traffic anymore. You need to show up where your target audience is researching its buying decisions – and that includes Perplexity.
Perplexity: the Basics
Founded in 2022, Perplexity is an AI-driven answer machine that responds to conversational queries with summarized replies based on information it pulls from a wide range of web sources and backed by citations. The latter makes Perplexity an interesting opportunity for gaining brand visibility and referral traffic.
It’s a direct competitor to Google’s AI Mode, which was added only recently to the traditional search engine. On top of that, users can perform searches via a range of models directly through Perplexity. There’s no need to leave the answer engine to get a reply via GPT-5, for example.
The use of a different model often leads to a different answer, which in turn means that optimizing for Perplexity is a complex matter. One we’ll go into further down in this guide.
A Google Search competitor, a chatbot tool alternative, and now also a threat to Chrome. In July 2025, Perplexity launched its own browser, Comet. The difference with Google’s Chrome is that Comet is an agentic AI-native browser, while Gemini was only recently added directly into Chrome.
Add to that the news of ChatGPT launching its Atlas browser in October 2025, and it becomes clear that these platforms aren’t just fighting for dominance as chatbots and AI search engines, but for market share in search infrastructure (browsers) as well.
While still a lot smaller than ChatGPT, Perplexity is growing fast. It doubled its monthly users from around 10 million at the start of 2024 to over 22 million in 2025 if we combine desktop and mobile traffic.
Before we discuss how you can get your brand in front of these users, it’s important to understand Perplexity’s place in the current Search landscape.
Perplexity vs other popular LLM tools
| Tool | LLM (Latest Model) | Owned by | Real-time browsing + known search engine(s) it pulls data from | Knowledge cut-off date | Cites sources |
| Perplexity | Uses multiple models | Perplexity AI | Yes, via PerplexityBot + Google API + Bing API | Depends on the model | Yes |
| ChatGPT | GPT-5 | OpenAI | Yes, via Bing. Might occasionally scrape Google results through third-party tools, e.g. SERPAPI | June 2024 | Yes |
| Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Pro | Yes, via Google | Jan 2025 | Yes | |
| Claude | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | Yes, via Brave | Jan 2025 | Yes |
| Copilot | GPT-5 | Microsoft | Yes, via Bing | Current (no cut-off date) | Yes |
Perplexity uses its own indexing crawler, PerplexityBot, as well as Google and Bing APIs to pull data from the web. On top of that, it also enables user-triggered crawling through Perplexity-User.
PerplexityBot is designed to discover, map, and analyze web content to improve and expand on the knowledge base Perplexity uses to generate answers. It:
- follows links across the web to discover new pages to index.
- reads robots.txt files*
- uses public signals like sitemaps and lastmod tags to recognize fresh and updated content.
- maps site structure to understand and later retrieve how the site’s pages and topics interconnect.
Perplexity-User is a user-triggered mechanism that fires when someone asks a question in Perplexity using its Copilot/Pro features. It:
- sends out a temporary agent to fetch specific live content in response to the prompt.
- operates in real time (instead of crawling entire sites in advance), as if a user were browsing the web.
- does not respect robots.txt.*
And then there’s the Perplexity Merchant Program. Similar to Google Merchant Center, businesses that sell and ship to the United States can upload their products to Perplexity’s Merchant Program so that Perplexity will show the right price, features, and more for their products.
*This is highly controversial. Many site owners complain that Perplexity’s agents should still follow robots.txt rules, and Cloudflare follows their stance. Perplexity, however, says Cloudflare wrongly treats its user-triggered AI Assistants as crawlers, while it should be treating them like normal users.
Citations
Another way Perplexity stands out is by the number of citations it provides and how it provides them. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity doesn’t auto-generate UTMs like ChatGPT does when you click one of its citations. It keeps those links clean, making it easier to cite their URLs as references in content you create.
Marketer Rebekah May also found that Perplexity cites a lot more sources than ChatGPT, and this is in line with our own findings at Flow Agency. However, this doesn’t result in more referral traffic.
The two screenshots below come from Peec.ai. They show the citations rendered by Perplexity and ChatGPT for the same set of prompts in the same time frame for a single client. Perplexity shared 8,047 sources, while ChatGPT only shared 5,195. Out of those, 20% and 15% respectively were links to the client’s site.
But when it comes to the referral traffic these citations sent, the balance looks very different: 73% of this client’s AI traffic comes from ChatGPT, whereas only 17% comes from Perplexity. This division of about 70-75% of AI traffic coming from ChatGPT and 12-17% coming from Perplexity is one we see with many clients.
External influences
Perplexity doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It has received a total of $1.5 billion in funding across various rounds and was valued at $20 billion during its last funding round in September 2025.
Some of these partnerships extend beyond the financial. Through its agreement with Wayra, the corporate venture capital and innovation arm of Telefónica, Perplexity has been able to integrate its technology into the telecommunications company’s offering (Source).
| Tool | Major investors | Major publisher partnerships |
| Perplexity | Nat Friedman, IVP, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (Bezos Expeditions Fund), Databricks, SoftBank, Naval Ravikant, Accel, and others. | TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribune, WordPress.com, LA Times, The Independent, Le Monde, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, CNN, Condé Nast, The Washington Post, Le Figaro, RTL Germany (NTV, Stern), USA Today Network, Crunchbase |
| ChatGPT | Microsoft, Thrive Capital, SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, MGX, Dragoneer Investment Group, and others. | Associated Press (AP) (licensing), Axel Springer (POLITICO, Business Insider), Le Monde & Prisa Media, Financial Times, News Corp, AP News, Reddit (data/API), OpenAI, The Atlantic & Vox Media |
| Gemini | Funded internally by Google/Alphabet | Reddit (content/data licensing), News Corp, Associated Press (AP), AAP (Australia) |
| Claude | Amazon, Google, Fidelity, Lightspeed Venture Partners, ICONIQ. | Wiley |
| Copilot | Funded internally by Microsoft. | Axel Springer, Reuters, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network, The Financial Times. |
Partnerships with publishers play an important role in Perplexity’s business strategy as well. The Perplexity Publishers’ Program aims to correctly credit, cite, and compensate journalistic publications. The latter happens through ad revenue sharing and revenue sharing through Perplexity’s subscriptions.
While a site’s relevancy and authority are still the primary factors that influence whether it’s included in Perplexity’s answers, members of the Publishers’ Program possibly benefit from greater visibility than non-members because
- their content has been verified through the partnership license.
- formal agreements ensure that Perplexity can use their content more extensively.
Answer Generation by Perplexity vs ChatGPT with Search vs Google AI Overview and AI Mode
| Perplexity | ChatGPT with Search | Google’s AI Overview | Google’s AI Mode | |
| Knowledge comes from… | search data | training data + search data | search data | search data |
| Generates results… | based on relevance, authority, semantic depth, and – probably – a prioritization mechanism | by synthesizing search results | by synthesizing search results | by synthesizing search results |
| Serves results… | as plain text with citations, images, and/or videos | as plain text with citations, images, and/or videos | as plain text with citations, images, and/or video | as plain text with citations, images, and/or video |
| The degree to which you can influence its results | Medium to high (use bar visual) | Medium to high (use bar visual) | Medium to high (use bar visual) | Medium to high (use bar visual) |
| How quickly you can influence its results | Fast (use bar visual) | Moderately fast (use bar visual) | Fast (use bar visual) | Fast (use bar visual) |
| Use cases | Primarily a research assistant delivering a summarized reply + references for further research. | Broad, from creative writing to coding, tutoring, coaching, brainstorming, and research. | Limited to getting a quick, short answer to a question. | Primarily a research assistant delivering a summarized reply + references for further research. |
| Conversational style | Conversational Q&A style | Dialogue-oriented | Not conversational | Conversational |
| Transparency of sources | High | Medium | High | HIgh |
Like Google, Perplexity aims to help users in their research, but by being an answer engine rather than a search engine, it doesn’t just provide sources, it also summarizes their information in a ready-to-use answer presented in a conversational tone.
Like ChatGPT, Perplexity allows users to perform their research in a conversational way, but it’s better suited for a Q&A-type of approach than true dialogue, and its strength is research rather than content or code creation.
While ChatGPT doesn’t have a ranking mechanism and Google does, things are a bit more complicated with Perplexity. The tool combines LLMs with web search to answer prompts. While there is no official documentation about any type of ranking mechanism, research does point to the existence of some ranking factors or, at least, a source prioritization process.
What is Perplexity SEO?
Perplexity SEO comprises the strategies and techniques used to optimize content in such a way that it is more likely to be included in answers generated by Perplexity.
Because Perplexity is an answer engine more than a search engine, another term sometimes used to describe SEO for Perplexity is Perplexity Answer Engine Optimization, or Perplexity AEO.
How to Optimize for Perplexity
At Flow Agency, we’ve seen time and time again that gaining visibility around a topic in one LLM does not guarantee the same visibility in another LLM. At times, the same or largely the same sources are cited, while other times, the top-cited sources are largely different.
Below you can see the results we got from different AI tools when asking them for the “best LLM marketing agency to do GEO for B2B brands?”. Note how Flow Agency is mentioned across platforms, but other providers like 42DM are not.
In other words, you can’t optimize for ChatGPT or Google Search and expect the results of that to trickle through to Perplexity.
Optimizing for Perplexity is also complex, in that the answer engine allows users to switch between models (GPT-4, Claude, Sonar, etc.), and the use of a different model often leads to a different answer.
So, what can you do to increase your visibility in Perplexity?
There are a few things we believe to be true for now.
1. Create an omnipresent brand
The more popular a brand, the higher its visibility in AI-driven tools such as Perplextity (Source). It’s no longer enough to draw leads in with SEO, you need to build a presence wherever your target audience hangs out.
That includes:
- answering questions on forums.
- incentivizing customers to leave reviews.
- getting mentioned on other sites, podcasts, and in the press.
Aside from appearing on third-party platforms, it’s important to expand your own brand channels beyond your website. Revive that LinkedIn page and start creating YouTube content. Perplexity often includes YouTube videos in the sources it cites.
2. Implement SEO best practices
While the overlap between Perplexity’s AI-generated responses and Google’s search results is rather low (25-35% on average), we have noticed that Perplexity’s answers tend to mirror Google search results for HR and work tech-related queries.
Combine that with knowing that modern SEO practices, and especially technical SEO, boost visibility in LLMs in general, and you can see that SEO is far from dead. It’s still important to implement SEO best practices. It’s just not enough anymore to do only that.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few things you definitely want to have in order:
- Check that your Robots.txt or firewall settings (for example, through Cloudflare) aren’t blocking any search engine or AI crawlers.
- Make sure that nothing that needs to be indexed is hidden behind a login or a paywall.
- Clean up duplicate content.
- Fix 404s and broken redirects.
- Tidy up redirect chains.
- Let search engines and LLMs know what your site is about and where your authority lies through intelligent internal linking.
3. Focus on readability and depth
Perplexity provides answers to questions asked in a natural, conversational tone. To increase your chances of being included, your content needs to answer those questions in natural language as well.
A study by Kevin Indig also found that Perplexity seems to favor longer content. He believes that this is because longer content is more likely to discuss a topic in-depth, and is thus more likely to contain an answer to the question prompted in Perplexity.
4. Build quality backlinks and mentions
The authority of your site and the trustworthiness of your content are more important than ever. While they aren’t everything, qualitative backlinks and mentions add to your site’s status and have the power to influence your visibility in Perplexity.
On top of using more traditional link-building techniques, B2B brands can:
- build freely accessible tools related to their product, like a calculator.
- create highly shareable content, like original research.
A more direct way to increase brand visibility in Perplexity is by trying to get cited on pages that Perplexity cites as sources. A study showed that “brands mentioned in AI search for top-of-funnel commercial queries are 6.5x more likely to come from third-party content than the brand itself.“
To find which pages Perplexity cites, use a tool like Ziptie.dev or Peec.ai. To get links from cited sources, you can
- offer the brand or writer a quote or insight.
- pay for a sponsored placement. This is especially the case for review sites and high-authority domains.
- suggest a link trade.
5. Ensure clear formatting and content structure
Perplexity and the models it uses are better at understanding your content when it is clearly structured. That includes:
- implementing the correct heading hierarchy.
- using bullet points to add semantic interpretation.
- including tables to visually represent information.
- formatting FAQ as Q&A.
- adding images, videos, and other graphics.
6. Keep your content fresh and backed by data
Perplexity updates its index daily so it can provide its users with up-to-date answers. Keeping your own content up-to-date and backing up your claims with research-backed data increases its credibility and its visibility.
| Perplexity is just one piece of the evolving AI search landscape. For a broader AI visibility strategy, see our deep dives into SEO for Gemini, SEO for ChatGPT and SEO for Microsoft Copilot. |
Tracking Perplexity Performance
Since there is no Search Console equivalent for Perplexity, correctly tracking its performance is tricky. One of the things you can do is track sessions from Perplexity to your site by setting up a dedicated LLM Google Analytics report:
1. Dimensions >page referrer
2. Metrics > sessions/conversions/engagement rate/… – Choose this to your liking
3. Filter > page referrer > regex contains:
| ^https:\/\/(www\.meta\.ai|www\.perplexity\.ai|chat\.openai\.com|claude\.ai|chat\.mistral\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|bard\.google\.com|chatgpt\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|edgeservices\.bing\.com)(\/.*)?$ |
If you want something even easier and visually clearer, you can use our free LLM dashboard. It shows referral traffic from Perplexity and other LLMs, which pages this traffic lands on, and how it converts.
We’ve tested several tools that track how many AI citations a web page has and have found Ziptie and Peec.ai to be some of the best. But even with those, you need to take into account that they simulate data and run queries for averages. The best way of knowing whether people are visiting your website through Perplexity is still by tracking your Perplexity referral traffic directly in your analytics platform.
This Is Your Chance to Stay Ahead
Perplexity is gaining new users fast, but there are still a lot of question marks around how to get in front of them. In this article, we’ve shared what we know to work for now.
By following these practices and keeping up-to-date with the most recent changes, you can stay ahead of competitors.
At Flow, we’re constantly experimenting and tracking what works. We can help you with your SEO for Perplexity and develop a strategy that ties into your overall marketing goals. Reach out today to learn more.
