Matt Turley, Continuum. Updated September 30, 2026.
I do this as part of Get Users, and I measure it on my own site too. Most of it is plumbing and plain writing. The hard part is being honest about what counts as a win.
Allow PerplexityBot in your robots.txt, and whitelist it in your firewall if you run one. Then put a direct answer in the first hundred words of the page, under a heading shaped like the question. Write your key numbers so each sentence still makes sense when it is quoted alone.
Check this first, because nothing else matters if the crawler is blocked. Perplexity's own bot documentation asks sites to allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and to permit requests from its published IP ranges.
If your site sits behind a web application firewall, Perplexity says you may need to whitelist its bots by hand. After you change robots.txt, it can take up to 24 hours for their systems to pick it up.
Ranking gets you retrieved. It does not get you quoted. In August 2026 we took 45 queries a site ranked for on Google, all at position 12 or better. A live web-search index surfaced the site on 27 of them, and a browsing AI model cited it on 7.
The pages that lost tended to phrase their key numbers as a vendor's price rather than a neutral market fact. To a model picking one source to quote, a price list reads like a pitch, and a plain market figure reads like an answer. A November 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735), found that adding citations and statistics to a page can lift its visibility in generative-engine answers by up to 40 percent, though the size of the lift varies by domain.
I write each heading the way a buyer types the question. It gives the engine a labeled passage to lift.
Being a source and being named are two separate wins. The AI can pull your page in as a source and still not say your name in the answer.
It happens often: a page that covers the topic well gets used as background, and the answer recommends a business that some other page presents as the answer. To get named, the page has to present you as the answer, plainly, not just cover the topic.
It depends on your category. When we checked 12 Charleston trip questions, the engines cited 302 links. TripAdvisor was 47 of them and Reddit was 4. For software questions it flips, and Reddit, GitHub and dev.to lead.
Perplexity also reads more than the others. In our 2026 study of AI answer sources it cited 20.0 sources per answer, against 7.4 for ChatGPT and 10.0 for Gemini.
Wondering whether a tracking tool is worth paying for? See how Peec AI and its alternatives compare.
Look at which sites the engine already trusts for your questions before you decide where to spend time.
Perplexity searches live, so a fix can show up in days. Answers move between runs, though. Ask each question three times, and only count it as won when you show up in most of the runs.
Get Users is the monthly version, and answer engine optimization is part of it. If you have a date to hit, the Deadline Sprint is two weeks of focused work, measured on day 0 and day 14.
I don't bill by the hour. Every price is fixed or a flat monthly retainer, agreed before work starts.