Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI answer engine that searches the web for each question and shows numbered sources next to its answer.
Perplexity is an AI answer engine. You ask it a question, it searches the web, and it writes an answer with numbered sources you can click. It's one of the six platforms AnswerOrbit asks every day.
For marketers, Perplexity is the platform where it's easiest to see which pages an answer was built from. Each claim in an answer points to a source, so you can see which page put a brand in it, or left one out.
How Perplexity answers
Perplexity searches the web for every answer. That makes it different from assistants that only search when they decide to. What it says about you depends heavily on the pages it finds for that question that day, and less on what a model remembers from training.
It also means your pages have to be readable by Perplexity's bots to be used. Perplexity lists its bots: PerplexityBot, which reads pages so they can appear and be linked in Perplexity's results, and Perplexity-User, which fetches a page when a user's question needs it. Block PerplexityBot in your robots.txt and you make it harder for Perplexity to cite you.
An example
Someone asks Perplexity, "What's the best coffee subscription for espresso drinkers?" The answer names Kestrel Roasters and Harrow & Pine, with a [1] next to Kestrel pointing to a review site's list of subscriptions, and a [2] pointing to Kestrel's own page.
Fernhill Coffee isn't named. Opening the sources shows why: the review site's list doesn't include Fernhill. That list is where Fernhill's work starts.
Perplexity in AnswerOrbit
We ask Perplexity in its own app, as someone who isn't signed in, from your prompt's market. We keep every page the answer used, which ones it cited, and the web searches it ran before answering. We don't read shopping results from Perplexity. See How we count.
The Platforms tab in Sources shows which sources Perplexity prefers for your prompts, and how often it used your website.