Doing Perplexity SEO means practicing ongoing SEO, building authority through third-party mentions, refreshing content, answering questions directly, and creating content worth citing. It also involves tracking your performance, through tools like OmniSEO®, to keep tabs on your mentions, citations, share of market, and more.
If you’re trying to get your business mentioned in more Perplexity responses, then tune-in: We’ve got tips and tricks for you.
Let’s dive in!
How to get better visibility in Perplexity
Getting cited and mentioned in Perplexity is the goal — but how do you help your business get there?
Here are some key strategies that will help you increase your chances of being cited by Perplexity:
- Practice ongoing SEO
- Building authority through third-party mentions
- Refresh content
- Answer questions directly
- Create content worth citing
1. Practice ongoing SEO
If you want to do Perplexity SEO right, stick with what you’re doing for traditional SEO (at least for part of your strategy.) For AI engines across the board, traditional SEO includes the fundamentals that help you get into AI engines too.
That’s because Perplexity operates similar to a search engine by:
- Using indexable and crawlable URLs to generate responses
- Citing authoritative domains relevant to a specific query
- Focusing on fresh, specific, and easy-to-digest content
Companies practicing ongoing SEO are one step ahead of competitors who aren’t — or who have paused their search engine optimization efforts.
So, double down on tasks like:
- Title tag and meta description optimization
- Content structure and readability
- Technically sound user experience (no slow websites!)
- Building strong internal links
- Obtaining backlinks to your website
2. Building authority through third-party mentions
If you want to get brand visibility in Perplexity, work on strengthening your authority through third-party mentions.
Perplexity operates a little differently than other AI platforms — it has pre-determined authoritative domain lists that are categorized (ecommerce, social, education, etc.) It leans on these authoritative sources to help determine the authority of others.
That’s why it’s important to build up authority through third-party, authoritative websites in your industry — it sends signals to Perplexity that your website is a trusted source to cite.
So, where can you start? Go with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the top frequently cited domains across LLMs — it appears in 11% of responses, only second to Reddit.
So, start building your presence on LinkedIn to help you earn citations. You can try creating:
- In-depth posts about topics in your industry
- A newsletter that you share content through daily, weekly, or monthly
- Videos that go in-depth on complex topics
3. Refresh content
If you want to see success with Perplexity SEO, you need to make refreshing content part of your strategy. AI engines like Perplexity want the latest information to ensure what searchers get is accurate. If all of your content is older (as in, it hasn’t been refreshed in quite some time), you aren’t getting cited over competitors that have more recent information.
Companies looking to optimize their presence in timely (or even evergreen) topics can use content refreshes to boost their visibility. Similar to search engine optimization, these refreshes should add value to the page versus changing a few words or phrases.
When refreshing content, consider questions like:
- Is the content still relevant?
- What has changed since publishing this article?
- Where are there content gaps?
- Is some information here no longer relevant?
- Is one section more important now and should be bumped up on the page?
Based on this initial research, you can create some specs for updating the content.
4. Answer questions directly
Getting into AI engines like Perplexity requires you to answer questions directly. Don’t spend time telling a long story before getting to the point — get to the point first, then follow up with the story.
AI engines want to extract information quickly. If your page has 3 paragraphs of information before you even answer the question, an AI engine isn’t going to use you as a source. Instead, it’s going to turn to a competitor that’s providing the information it needs right away.
As a result, you’ll miss opportunities to get visibility in responses.
So, to do SEO for Perplexity right, focus on answering questions directly. Here’s an example of doing that vs. not:
| Good structure | Bad structure |
| What ingredients are in an egg roll?
Egg rolls typically include a combination of vegetables (cabbage, carrots, scallions) and a meat of choice (pork, chicken, beef, or shrimp). They’re typically spiced with garlic, ginger, and similar spices. All of it is wrapped in egg-enriched wheat wrapper, but some will use wonton wrappers as a shortcut. |
What ingredients are in an egg roll?
Eggs rolls have evolved over time to include different ingredients. It really depends where you go to get your eggrolls. Some of them include meat, while others don’t. Egg rolls will often include vegetables. The typical vegetables of choice are cabbage and carrots. Sometimes people will use mushrooms. Scallions are also pretty common.
|
When looking at the good structure vs. the bad structure, you can see that it took much too long to get to what the ingredients are. The good structure answers the question directly by providing a synopsis of the different types of ingredients included.
That’s what an AI engine is looking for.
So, review your content and the way it’s structured to ensure that you’re providing direct answers first and more elaborative explanations second.
5. Create content worth citing
Creating content that’s worth citing doesn’t mean just creating content to cover a topic — it means doing more to make your page the one Perplexity should cite. That means integrating the following to enhance the value of your content:
- Data points and statistics
- Unique perspectives or takes on a topic
- Authoritative quotes from people at your company (expertise)
The goal is to add something to your content that others don’t have — something that makes it worthwhile for Perplexity to pull your page instead of competitors’.
How to track Perplexity visibility
Like other answer engines, performance tracking is not convenient in Perplexity. Businesses looking to monitor and track their visibility will need to conduct searches manually or invest in a paid platform like OmniSEO®.
So, what does tracking visibility in Perplexity look like? It includes things like:
- Tracking your mentions and citations
- Monitoring your competitions mentitons and citations
- Identifying what prompts you show up for (and ones you don’t)
- Market share of AI SEO visibility
- And more
It’s not like traditional SEO — it focuses more on visibility and brand mentions versus traffic, clicks, and other typical SEO actions.
FAQs on Perplexity SEO
How does Perplexity work?
According to Perplexity, “Perplexity serves as an answer engine by searching the web, identifying trusted sources, and synthesizing information into clear, up-to-date responses.” Like AI Overviews, it aims to provide the information users need without “sift[ing] through a list of links.”
From an SEO and AI marketing agency perspective, Perplexity works by:
- Prioritizing reputable and well-known sources, like Wikipedia
- Emphasizing fresh content, like a new article or updated post
- Focusing on relevancy, like a health-based blog vs. news site for a health-related query
- Highlighting different content formats, like text, video, and images
The above is similar to other search and answer engines. What separates Perplexity is its emphasis on well-known sources. A BrightEdge study found, for example, that Perplexity cited Yahoo, CNBC, and MarketWatch more than Google.
How could Perplexity AI affect SEO?
A recent study by the enterprise SEO company BrightEdge found that Perplexity searches are growing at a rate of 40% each month, and 60% of the citations provided in those searches overlap with the top 10 organic Google search results. What does that mean for search?
While Perplexity is sure to bring changes to the search world, SEO is still going to be important for attracting organic web traffic. Google, after all, is still testing their AI Overview — experts predict that upon its official launch, the AI Overview will overtake Perplexity again.
That said, the ranking criteria Google uses is what will likely see the biggest changes. Some examples include:
- Contextual relevance: Perplexity’s strong contextual understanding means you must consider contextual elements such as user intent and information relevance when creating content.
- Changes in search behaviors: As technologies like voice assistants become more popular, search language is likely to become more conversational over time. Moving away from focusing on keywords and prioritizing natural speech can help you appeal to these tools.
- Focus on user engagement: User engagement metrics, such as bounce rates and time spent on page, are likely to play an even larger role in search engine rankings. Focusing on human audiences rather than search crawlers can help you improve these metrics and look better to search engines as a result.
- Site credibility: The more authoritative your website, the better you’ll rank on AI-driven search engines like Perplexity. To improve your credibility, it can help to expand the scope of your SEO beyond individual pages to create a holistic content strategy.
How long does SEO for Perplexity take?
SEO for Perplexity can take as little as a few weeks to as long as a few months. How long it takes to see results will depend on an organization’s traditional SEO and its investment in answer engine optimization.
Companies practicing ongoing SEO for years, for example, and investing time and resources into AEO will often see results in a shorter time frame than companies that haven’t prioritized search engine optimization.
Is optimizing for Perplexity worth it?
Yes!
While not the most popular answer engine (that title goes to ChatGPT), Perplexity still boasts a sizable user base. The company processes more than 100 million searches each week — almost half a billion searches per month.
Companies investing in search everywhere optimization now, including for Perplexity give themselves a competitive advantage. Instead of starting Perplexity optimizations later, when there is more competition, these companies will have a solid foundation (and presence) on the platform.
Get discovered in Perplexity with AI SEO
Congrats! You’ve learned to rank in Perplexity with AI SEO. Now, you’re ready to start growing your brand’s presence in Perplexity answers. Need professional help? Contact us online to learn how our AI SEO services can help!
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