AIRankCardHow to get your business recommended by Perplexity
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Business owners keep asking some version of "how do you actually get your business recommended inside ChatGPT or Perplexity?" (example thread on Reddit). Good reviews and a decent site don't always get you named. The good news: Perplexity is the easiest AI assistant to diagnose, because it shows the pages it used.
How Perplexity picks names
Perplexity runs a web search when you ask it something, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer with numbered sources. It can only name businesses that appear in the pages it read. So the job is less "convince the AI" and more "be on the pages it reads, and make your own page easy to quote."
Step 1: Let it read your site
Perplexity's crawler docs list two visitors: PerplexityBot, which "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity", and Perplexity-User, which fetches pages when someone asks a question. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure PerplexityBot isn't disallowed, including by a catch-all "User-agent: *" rule. If you use a firewall or bot protection, check it isn't blocking either one. More on this: is your website blocking ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Step 2: Ask it what your customers ask
Type 5 to 10 real buyer questions, like "best emergency plumber in [city]" or "[your service] for [specific need]". For each answer, write down: were you named, who was named instead, and which numbered sources were shown. Ask again on another day; answers change.
Step 3: Work the sources list
The sources are your to-do list. If a local "best of" article keeps appearing, ask the publisher to consider you. If a directory or review site keeps appearing, complete your profile there. For local businesses, Perplexity is reported to use licensed Yelp data (source), so a complete Yelp page is worth the 15 minutes.
Step 4: Put the deciding facts on your own pages
Say plainly, in text (not only in images): what you do, the towns you serve, your hours, and what makes you a fit ("same-day", "older homes", "Spanish-speaking"). Answer the question in the first two sentences of the page. Make your name, address and phone match everywhere.
What it won't do
None of this can promise a mention, and one answer is a sample, not a ranking. But a site Perplexity can read, plus a presence on the pages it already cites, is the honest path in.