How Perplexity reaches your site
Perplexity documents two agents. PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. Perplexity-User supports actions a person takes in Perplexity: when someone asks a question, it may visit a page and link it in the answer, and because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules.
Perplexity notes that changes can take up to 24 hours to reach its systems. If your robots.txt or a security service blocks PerplexityBot, start there. Our answer on blocking AI crawlers covers the OpenAI and Google equivalents.
What source labels mean
Perplexity tags some cited domains with a label: Government, Academic, or Trusted. It says labels apply to a whole website, are set by its source review process alone, and that a site without a label is not judged low quality. It describes Government sources as useful for legal questions, so a firm's page will often appear in the same answer as a court or legislature site. A firm page that cites the statute or court rule it relies on gives the reader a way to check it against those sources.
What helps a firm page get cited
Perplexity does not publish its selection rules, so treat this as a working hypothesis from testing: pages that answer one question directly, name the state and court, and cite primary sources tend to be easier to cite than general overviews. The North Carolina guide shows what that state-level detail looks like. To see whether it is working, run the dated question tests in how to track AI citations.
Go deeper
The GEO guide for law firms covers how each assistant finds sources and what makes a legal page worth naming.
Common questions
Does Perplexity use my firm's pages to train its models?
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, and that Perplexity-User is not used to collect training data.