Free tool · Perplexity
Can Perplexity actually cite you?
Four things have to be true before Perplexity can name your site in an answer. This checks all four against Perplexity’s own agents, and tells you which one is in the way.
01The catch
What most sites get wrong about Perplexity.
Perplexity is retrieval-first and cites more aggressively than the other engines, which makes it the surface where a citation gap shows up earliest. A site that is missing here is usually missing everywhere, and finds out here first.
PerplexityBot being allowed says the door is open. Which sources Perplexity actually pulls for a given question is decided by relevance and by what it already indexes, and that is measured by asking it questions rather than by reading a file.
02Questions
- Which crawler does Perplexity use?
- Perplexity fetches pages at answer time using PerplexityBot. Perplexity runs no separate training crawler for this surface.
- Why am I not showing up in Perplexity?
- Four things have to be true before citation is even possible: the answer-time agents can fetch the page, the content is in the HTML without JavaScript, the page carries structured data, and the business exists as an identifiable entity. This check reports all four. If they all pass and you are still absent, the constraint has moved to authority, which is about who else references you rather than anything on your own site.
- Does blocking training crawlers remove me from Perplexity?
- Perplexity runs no separate training crawler for this surface, so the only access decision that matters here is whether PerplexityBot can reach the page.
- Is this check free, and does it need an account?
- Free, with no account and no email. The check is HTTP and parsing rather than model calls, so it costs bandwidth rather than tokens, and a free tool that asks for an address before telling you anything is a lead form wearing a tool's clothes.
- Does passing this guarantee Perplexity will cite me?
- PerplexityBot being allowed says the door is open. Which sources Perplexity actually pulls for a given question is decided by relevance and by what it already indexes, and that is measured by asking it questions rather than by reading a file.
03The other engines
Each engine uses different agents, so a site can be readable by one and invisible to another. The checks are separate for that reason.
Next
One engine is a sample, not a picture.
The full check scores all four preconditions across every engine at once, across twenty-three checks, with each finding traced back to a line in your HTML.