The short answer
Perplexity SEO starts with how Perplexity works: it searches the web when you ask, reads a handful of pages, and cites them next to the answer. To be cited, your site must be open to its crawler, answer questions plainly on the page, and match what directories and review sites say about you. Nobody can promise a citation.
For local questions, Perplexity often cites directories, review sites, Reddit threads and local news, not just business websites. Accurate listings and real reviews on those sites count as much as your own pages.
Ask Perplexity the questions your customers ask, like "best dog groomer in [town]". Look at which sources it cites. Those are the pages to get right, or to get onto.
It overlaps. Perplexity uses live search results, so pages that rank and answer clearly tend to be cited.
Not directly. It reads public web pages and listings.
Not in its organic answers. Sponsored placements are labeled separately.
To optimize your website for AI search, put your key facts in plain text on the page rather than in images or PDFs, give each main service its own page, answer common customer questions directly, keep details identical to your Google profile, and make sure robots.txt isn't blocking the crawlers AI search tools use.
2 min readYou can't ask or pay ChatGPT to recommend your business.
2 min readThe main AI assistants like ChatGPT are Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, Copilot from Microsoft and Perplexity.
2 min readBook a time with Lehvel and we’ll go through what your business actually needs.