Why doesn't Perplexity cite my website?
Quick answer
Perplexity can only cite pages it can read. The usual technical blockers are a robots.txt rule against PerplexityBot, a firewall or CDN rule that blocks it (Perplexity tells site owners to allow its published IP ranges), and text that only appears after JavaScript runs. If none of those apply, the reason is usually content: another page answers the question more directly or with more specific facts. Nobody can guarantee a citation, but you can remove the blockers and make your answers easy to quote.
Perplexity’s two crawlers
| User agent | What it does | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
PerplexityBot | Surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. | Follows it. Changes can take up to 24 hours. |
Perplexity-User | Visits a page when a user asks a question, and may link to it in the answer. | “Generally ignores robots.txt rules” because a user asked |
Technical checklist
- robots.txt: no
Disallow: /forPerplexityBot, and none in the*group unless PerplexityBot has its own group that allows it. - Firewall / CDN: Perplexity’s docs say you may need to allowlist PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User by user agent and by its published IP lists (perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json and perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json). On Cloudflare, also review the AI bot policies; Cloudflare says that from September 15, 2026 new domains block Training and Agent bots on pages with ads by default, while Search is allowed.
- HTML text: PerplexityBot did not run JavaScript in Vercel’s 2024 analysis. Use View page source to check that your main text is there.
- Indexable: no
noindexin meta robots or the X-Robots-Tag header on the pages you want cited. - Sitemap: a sitemap listed in robots.txt so new pages are easy to find.
Content that is easy to cite
- Put the question your customer asks in a heading, and a two- or three-sentence answer right under it.
- Use specific facts in plain text: prices, sizes, service areas, turnaround times, dates. Vague pages are hard to quote.
- Show who is behind the page and when it was last updated.
- Keep business details the same everywhere they appear (site, directories, social profiles), and link those profiles from your schema with
sameAs.
These make a page easier to quote. They do not force any assistant to choose it.
What we found on three live sites
All three let PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User in and returned the full page. Their remaining gaps were citation-readiness items, like missing dates in the schema and few question-style headings:
| Site (home page) | Score | What the checker found |
|---|---|---|
| astorventuresllc.com | 98/100 | All 16 crawlers allowed; 3,664 words in the raw HTML. Small gaps: a 253-character meta description and no sameAs profile links in the schema. |
| hohocam.com | 94/100 | All 16 crawlers allowed; 2,165 words in the raw HTML; Product, Offer, FAQPage and VideoObject schema. Gaps: no <main> element and no published or updated date in the schema. |
| kemuva.com | 87/100 | All 16 crawlers allowed; 2,809 words in the raw HTML. Gaps: only Organization and WebSite schema on the home page, one question-style heading, no <main> element, no dates in the schema, and a 193-character meta description. |
Want a second pair of eyes? The AI visibility audit checks 16 AI and search crawlers against your robots.txt, firewall and HTML, and sends a plain-English PDF report within 48 hours with ready-to-paste fixes. $79 for the report, $149 with the fixes applied. It is a diagnosis, not a promise of citations.
Frequently asked questions
Does Perplexity use robots.txt?
PerplexityBot follows robots.txt, and Perplexity says changes can take up to 24 hours to apply. Perplexity-User, which fetches a page because a user asked, generally ignores robots.txt rules, according to Perplexity.
Does Perplexity use my content to train AI models?
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, and that Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training.
I allowed PerplexityBot. Why am I still not cited?
Access is only the first step. Perplexity picks the sources it thinks answer the question best. Compare your page with the pages it does cite for the same question: are they more direct, more specific or more recent?
Can I check this without technical skills?
Partly. Open yourbusiness.com/robots.txt and look for PerplexityBot. For the rest, the free checker or the paid audit tests the live response and the HTML for you.