What is Perplexity?
Perplexity is a standalone answer engine that always searches the live web before answering and shows the sources it used as clickable cards next to the answer.
Unlike a general chatbot that can answer from memory, Perplexity is built around search as the default behavior. Every query triggers a live web search, and the answer is assembled from what comes back, with source cards shown alongside it. That citation-first layout is the whole product, not an optional add-on mode.
It has become a common benchmark in AI-visibility tracking for a practical reason: because search happens on every query rather than only in a special mode, every prompt run against it is a real citation opportunity, which makes it easier to test consistently than products where search only sometimes fires.
It has its own crawlers, separate from the ones used by other AI products. PerplexityBot builds its index, and a separate one, Perplexity-User, does the live fetch during a session. Blocking one without realizing the other exists is a common gap in a site's crawler configuration.
Related
- PerplexityBotPerplexityBot builds Perplexity's index. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Perplexity runs no separate training crawler, so every block against it affects citation.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
- Share of voiceShare of voice is the proportion of AI answers in a category that name your brand, relative to the competitors named alongside you.
- Source cardA source card is the small preview tile an answer engine shows for each source it cites, typically a favicon, the site's name, and a short excerpt, shown separately from the answer text itself.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.