Defined term

PerplexityBot

Perplexity's crawlers

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Definition

PerplexityBot indexes pages so they can be surfaced and linked in Perplexity answers. Perplexity's documentation states it is not used to crawl content for foundation models. A second agent, Perplexity-User, visits a page because a user's question requires it.

Why it matters

Perplexity cites sources on nearly every answer, so a block here shows up in citation data faster than anywhere else. It is the engine where an access mistake is cheapest to detect and most expensive to leave in place.

How to measure it

Watch your own domain's appearance in cited sources over a fixed question set. Count only URLs marked in the answer body — the retrieval candidate pool is much larger than what gets cited, and counting it inflates the figure several times over.

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FAQ

Questions teams ask before they start

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap on technical access and content quality, but GEO measures the answer itself — whether the brand is named, recommended and cited — instead of a ranking position.

How often should results be remeasured?

Keep the question set stable and rerun on a fixed cadence, then compare like with like. Changing questions and cadence at the same time makes results incomparable.

Does being cited mean being recommended?

No. A page can be cited as background while a competitor is the one actually recommended. The two are reported separately.

Is this written by AI?

Drafts can be generated, but every published piece goes through human review. Nothing reaches the site automatically.

How does this relate to traditional SEO?

It overlaps but is not the same. Both reward clear, credible content; only one of them is measured by whether a model names you in an answer.

Where do the definitions come from?

From how the measurement actually works in the product, so the vocabulary on the site and the numbers in the workspace mean the same thing.

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