Perplexity
AI answer engine that searches the live web and returns synthesized answers with inline citations.
Definition
Perplexity is an AI-native search product — it answers a query by fetching live web pages, synthesizing an answer, and showing inline citations. Unlike ChatGPT (which falls back to training data), Perplexity is citation-heavy by design: every claim links to a source. Crawled by its own PerplexityBot user-agent.
When to use
Optimize for Perplexity citations by allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt, publishing answer-extractable content, and adding schema.org structured data so the bot has clean entity signals to quote.
See also
- ChatGPT — OpenAI's consumer LLM product — chat, browse, and run plugins on the web via GPT-class models.
- AI Overviews — Google Search's AI-generated answer block at the top of results pages, sourced from indexed structured data.
- robots.txt — Plain text file at /robots.txt that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch.