Perplexity, tracked
Perplexity SEO, measured on every probe sweep
Perplexity SEO is the work of making your pages the sources Perplexity cites. Growth Radar measures it three ways: a Perplexity probe every day records which sites its answers cite for your site's questions, verified PerplexityBot hits show whether it can read your pages, and Perplexity referrals count the visits it sends.
What it measures, and how
Perplexity is the engine Growth Radar probes most often.
- Perplexity probe
- Questions a site should answer go to Perplexity, every day. The sites each answer cites are recorded, each question counts once per sweep, and questions naming your brand are kept out of the rate.
- PerplexityBot hits
- Server-side hits from PerplexityBot, which indexes pages for Perplexity answers, counted only when the IP is verified against Perplexity's published ranges. A page it never fetches is unlikely to be cited.
- Perplexity referrals
- Visits that arrive with perplexity.ai as the referrer, counted in the site's own analytics next to the other AI assistants.
What moves a Perplexity citation
Perplexity doesn't publish how it picks sources. What you can check is the chain it depends on: robots.txt lets PerplexityBot in, the firewall doesn't challenge it, the page answers the question in a passage that stands on its own, and the page is fresh enough to be worth fetching.
The free AI visibility checker tests the first two, and the free audit flags pages whose median paragraph falls outside 40 to 150 words. When you ship a change, the probe rate at ship time is recorded, and the change is graded 28 days later.
What it can't see
- Probe questions come from Bing's report of what people asked AI assistants where the site could have been cited, then from the site's niche keywords, then from its top Search Console queries. Perplexity publishes no query volumes, so the sample can't be weighted by demand.
- Perplexity doesn't report citations to site owners the way Bing does, so there's no second-party count to check the probe against.
- Most small sites get a wide interval from one sweep; the range is shown rather than hidden.
Growth Radar or another tool
Prompt trackers that cover Perplexity alongside other engines, per their own pages: Checked October 28, 2026.
| Tool | Price | AI engines | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth Radar | Free $0 (1 site); Pro $49 a month; Agency $199 a month; 14-day free trial, no card | Narrow: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, checked daily | Teams that ship SEO and GEO fixes as code on several sites and want each one graded win, loss or flat 28 days after merge |
| Peec AI | Starter $95 a month (50 prompts, 3 models, unlimited seats); Pro $245; Advanced $495; Enterprise custom | Pick 3 models on self-serve plans, each extra one a paid add-on; up to 13 on Enterprise | Marketing teams and agencies that want prompt tracking plus ranked Actions at a self-serve price |
| Otterly.AI | Lite $29 a month (15 prompts), Standard $189 (100), Premium $489 (400) | Gemini, Google AI Mode and Claude are paid add-ons | Small prompt sets on a budget: a $29 entry plan, with API and MCP access from the $189 plan |
| AthenaHQ | Free tier with 300 credits; Starter $295 a month for 3,600 credits; one credit is one AI response | 11, including Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI and Mistral | Teams that publish new content through a CMS and want the widest engine list at a small-team price |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Index data from $199 a month, custom prompts from $50 a month, all AI models $699 a month, $0.02 per extra check | Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot | Teams that want market-wide share of voice from a pre-collected index of 514M+ prompts, with no prompt setup |
Sources: Peec AI pricing · Peec AI Actions · Otterly.AI pricing · AthenaHQ pricing · Ahrefs Brand Radar
Common questions
How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite?
Perplexity doesn't publish a ranking formula. The parts a site controls are whether PerplexityBot may fetch the page, whether a firewall blocks it, and whether a passage answers the question on its own. Growth Radar checks those and measures the citation rate before and after a change.
Should I allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt?
If you want to be cited by Perplexity, yes. PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity answers; a disallow rule or a firewall challenge keeps your pages out of its index. The free AI visibility checker tests both.
How do I know whether a Perplexity change worked?
Pick the metric the change targets, such as citations, PerplexityBot hits or Perplexity referrals, and compare it before and after the change on the same pages. Growth Radar records that baseline when you mark the fix as shipped and reports a verdict once enough days have passed to tell a real move from noise.
Can I see Perplexity traffic in my analytics?
Yes, as visits with perplexity.ai as the referrer. Growth Radar counts them in the site's own analytics next to the other AI assistants. Visits from links copied out of an answer arrive with no referrer and can't be attributed.
Related
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