Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that answers questions in plain, conversational language. When you ask something, it searches the web and writes an answer with citations that link to the original sources, so you can check them. It uses AI models that include OpenAI's GPT models and Anthropic's Claude.
Source: Perplexity Help Center, What is Perplexity?, checked October 29, 2026
What Perplexity means for your business
Perplexity's help center says each answer comes with numbered citations that link to the original sources. That makes it easy to see which pages an answer leaned on. We'd ask it the questions your buyers ask and note which sites get cited, whether yours is one of them, and whether the facts about you match your own site.
Perplexity's crawler page says PerplexityBot is the crawler that shows and links websites in its search results, and that it isn't used to train AI models. Perplexity recommends allowing it in your robots.txt file if you want your site to show up. A second agent, Perplexity-User, visits a page when someone's question calls for it, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, since a person asked for the visit. We'd make sure your robots.txt lets PerplexityBot in.
If your site sits behind a firewall service such as Cloudflare, Perplexity says you may need to let its bots through on purpose, and its page shows how. It also says Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode, if it's switched on, can still challenge its bots even with that rule in place. That's the setting we'd check first.
If you're wondering whether Perplexity is worth your time next to ChatGPT and the other AI tools, the AI search research we publish shows each one's share of the clicks AI tools send to websites.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, ChatGPT called Perplexity an AI search engine, cited mostly Perplexity's own pages, and added a table comparing it with ChatGPT. Google's AI Overview cited Perplexity's help center first, then tech sites, Wikipedia and YouTube, and noted the word's everyday meaning.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in the platforms
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