Short answer: Perplexity attaches sources to nearly every answer, so your access and extraction problems become visible in citation data faster here than anywhere else. Fix Perplexity first and you usually fix the others by side effect.

Two agents, two different decisions

Perplexity's documentation names PerplexityBot, which indexes pages so they can be surfaced and linked in answers and which the docs state is not used to crawl content for foundation models. A second agent, Perplexity-User, visits a page because a user's question requires it; the documentation notes this one generally does not follow robots.txt, because the request came from a person.

That distinction matters when you write the rule. Blocking PerplexityBot removes you from Perplexity answers. It is not a training-use decision, and treating it as one is a common and expensive mistake.

Count citations correctly or the number is useless

This is where most tooling in this category inflates. An engine assembles a retrieval candidate pool that is much larger than what ends up cited in the answer body. Counting the pool instead of the in-answer markers overstates citation share by a multiple — we measured two to four times on our own runs before we fixed it.

Only count sources actually marked in the answer body. A retrieval pool is not a citation.

What makes a page citable here

  • Server-rendered content. No JavaScript dependency for the substance.
  • A self-contained passage per question. The paragraph has to survive being cut out and pasted into a reply.
  • Explicit dates on anything time-bound, because the engine is choosing between your page and a fresher one.
  • Outbound evidence links. A claim that cites its own source is easier to reuse than a bare assertion.

How to read the result

Track your domain's appearance among cited sources across a fixed question set, and look at rank among all cited sources rather than a share percentage — being the fifth most-cited source out of a hundred is a real, interpretable position, while "5% citation share" can move for reasons that have nothing to do with you.