Perplexity SEO for small businesses: a practical guide
Perplexity runs its own crawler and pulls local data from Yelp, Tripadvisor and OpenTable. Which of those matter for your business, and what to check first.
Perplexity is smaller than ChatGPT, but its users tend to be researching before they buy, and every answer cites its sources with links. For a small business that makes it worth an afternoon. Here's what Perplexity actually reads and what you can change.
Where Perplexity gets its information
Its own crawler
Perplexity publishes two user agents. PerplexityBot crawls the web to surface and link sites in Perplexity's answers, and Perplexity says it isn't used to train AI models. Perplexity-User fetches a page when someone's question needs it, and generally ignores robots.txt because a person asked. Perplexity recommends allowing both, along with its published IP ranges, and says robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.
Data partners
- Yelp. In March 2024 Perplexity started using Yelp data for local recommendations, including maps, photos, ratings and quotes from reviews, with links back to the Yelp page.
- Tripadvisor and Viator. A January 2025 partnership brought Tripadvisor reviews, ratings and summaries, and Viator's tours and activities, into travel answers. Hotels came first.
- OpenTable. Since August 2025 restaurant answers can show live availability and a Reserve button, drawn from OpenTable's restaurant data.
For a restaurant, café, hotel or tour operator, those listings may matter as much as your website. For a plumber or a law firm, your site and your general web reputation do more of the work.
Step 1: make sure PerplexityBot can get in
It's rarely blocked on purpose. In our scan of 101 US small-business sites, exactly one blocked PerplexityBot in robots.txt. But 8 of the 101 returned a 403 to our automated requests even with a normal browser user agent. That's usually a firewall or security plugin, and Perplexity's own documentation includes setup steps for Cloudflare and AWS WAF because it happens so often.
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /Run the AI Crawler Checker to see what your robots.txt says. If you use bot protection, allow Perplexity by its published IP ranges as well as its name, since names are easy to fake.
Step 2: fix the listings Perplexity reads
- Everyone: claim your Yelp page, check the category, hours and phone number, and reply to recent reviews.
- Restaurants: if you take reservations, make sure OpenTable is set up and your menu and tags are current. That's what Perplexity matches against questions like “quiet Italian place with vegetarian options”. See our guide for restaurants.
- Hotels, tours, attractions: keep your Tripadvisor listing complete and answer questions on it.
Step 3: give it pages worth citing
Perplexity doesn't publish how it picks sources, so ignore anyone selling a “Perplexity ranking factor” list. What it needs is a page that answers the question in readable text. That means one page per service, the area you cover, prices or ranges, and anything that sets you apart, like “Saturday appointments” or “fixed-fee divorce”.
Put that content in the HTML itself. Many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript (more on that), so a page that only fills in after scripts load can look empty to them. The SEO Health Snapshot counts the words in your raw HTML.
Add business schema too. 30 of the 93 small-business homepages we could read had none. The Schema Generator takes a few minutes.
Step 4: get mentioned elsewhere
Perplexity cites several sources per answer, so being described the same way on a few independent sites helps. That could be local news, a trade association directory, or a supplier's “find an installer” page. One honest mention on a site Perplexity already cites beats ten directory submissions nobody reads.
Step 5: measure it
Perplexity visits show up as referrals from perplexity.ai in Google Analytics. Our guide to tracking AI referral traffic sets up one report for Perplexity, ChatGPT and the rest. Then ask Perplexity your customers' three most common questions once a month and note whether you're cited, or use the AI Visibility Quick Scan.
Want the same checks for Claude as well? See the technical checklist for Perplexity and Claude, or book an audit and we'll go through it for you.
Sources
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