---
title: "Perplexity Visibility Tracker - LeapScope"
url: https://leap-scope.com/trackers/perplexity
description: "Track how Perplexity answers your buyers' questions: whether your brand is named, how it is described, and which numbered sources each answer cites, every…"
---

Perplexity AI

# Perplexity Visibility Tracker

Perplexity is built around citations: every answer is grounded in a live search and lists its sources. That makes it the clearest engine for seeing which pages shape an answer, and a demanding one to be cited in.

## How Perplexity answers and cites

Perplexity searches the web for every query, reads the top results and writes an answer with numbered references to the pages it used. Brands that appear are the ones its retrieval found on those pages.

Its crawler, PerplexityBot, builds the index its search draws on; Perplexity-User fetches pages when a user asks about them. Both should be allowed in robots.txt by any site that wants to be cited.

## How LeapScope tracks Perplexity

Prompts are run daily against Perplexity's Sonar API, the same model family that powers the consumer product's default answers, which returns the answer and its source list. This is an official API, not a scrape of the website, so results are stable and the sources are exact.

Mentions, positions, sentiment and competitor mentions are extracted from the answer text; the source list is stored as citations.

## What is recorded for every prompt

- **Mention**: Whether the brand appears in the answer
- **Position**: First, early or later in the answer
- **Sentiment**: Positive, neutral or negative portrayal
- **Citations**: Every numbered source
- **Competitors**: The same for each named competitor
- **History**: One data point per prompt per day

## Limitations

- Results come from the Sonar API rather than a logged-in browser session, so user-specific personalization and Pro-mode model choices are not reflected.
- Perplexity's source selection favors recently updated pages; a tracked prompt can change sources quickly after competitors publish.

## Other engines

## FAQ

### How does Perplexity choose which sources to cite?

It runs a web search, selects pages that answer the query directly and are recently updated, and cites the ones it used. Direct, well-structured, dated pages are cited more often.

### Is tracking through the Sonar API the same as the Perplexity website?

Sonar is the model family behind the default consumer answers and returns the same kind of cited answer. It does not reflect per-user settings such as Pro mode, which is stated on every report.

### Why is Perplexity useful for citation analysis?

Because it always cites, and cites precisely. Across a prompt set, its citations show which review sites, docs and comparison pages define your category.

### Does Perplexity respect robots.txt?

Perplexity documents PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User and states that they honor robots.txt. Check that both are allowed on the pages you want cited.

### How often are Perplexity prompts run?

Once a day per prompt, in each selected country. The daily series is what makes a change in visibility distinguishable from normal variation.

## Track Perplexity and the other engines from one workspace

LeapScope runs your prompts on every supported engine daily and reports mentions, citations and share of voice side by side.