Curious about how to get your brand noticed on Perplexity Search? You’re not alone. With Apple’s rumored acquisition of Comet making headlines, marketers everywhere are wondering if this AI-powered browser might be the next big thing in search. Whether you’re here to stay ahead of the curve or simply want your site to pop up in more AI-driven answers, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s dive into what makes Perplexity tick—and how you can use it to your advantage.
Why Should You Care About Ranking on Perplexity Search?
More than 2-thirds of smartphone users in the United States use an iPhone as their smartphone of choice. About 50% of all internet traffic starts on a mobile device in the United States. Being the default browser and search engine for 68% of half of all internet usage in the United States sounds pretty great right? That might be the reality for Perplexity and their new browser, Comet, as Apple is currently determining if they will go through with the 14 billion dollar acquisition. That is an eye popping amount of money for an acquisition of a company that has never turned a profit (actually lost $65 million in 2024). However it could be a leap forward in AI development for Apple who is severely behind its big tech competitors.It would also mean a real threat to Chrome and less reliance on using Google products on Apple devices. A true threat to Google Search is something that Google has not experienced in decades. The threat is given even more credibility by the fact that Comet is actually quite good and those who have tested it rave about the AI-enhanced browser with built in perplexity search engine. Even if the acquisition from Apple does not go through, it is interesting enough of a search product to look into ranking organically on the Perplexity search and optimizing web content for LLMs in general as the jump in AI-search queries has increased from 250m to 1.1 billion in the last year alone!
What Are the Top Ranking Factors for Perplexity Search?
In one of our tests, we found that the top ranking page on Google, for non-branded terms, was never the same as the top result in Perplexity. Even more alarming was that each 1:1 query resulted in 85% unique results across Google and Perplexity. While there will be some principles of Search Engine Optimization that remain the same, the results are different enough that a close examination of the top ranking factors for perplexity was necessary. After analyzing SERPs using queries and prompts from multiple industries on Perplexity, we have compiled our top ranking factors for Comet, and the Perplexity search engine here.
The best way to strategize for Perplexity Search is to like traditional SEO, break it out into on site, or on domain optimizations and off page or off domain optimizations. Only off page and on page optimizations don't mean quite the same thing for LLM optimizations as they do for traditional SEO. Below are the most impactful on page and off page optimizations for perplexity search.
On Page:
Content freshness: Since Perplexity crawls web pages and uses information from those pages in real time, it is extremely important to continue to update and improve the content on your site. Content freshness is a top ranking factor in Perplexity’s Sonar model.
Trustworthy and credible data used and cited: Linking to credible, external sources that back up any claims made in your content will give you a competitive edge over other sites. Perplexity will prioritize pages that reference other trustworthy sites, this includes academic, industry leaders and market data sources. The LLMs also prioritize unique data sets and perspectives on data. You more than likely have more than enough internal data from your customers that can work as a great sample data set to publish your own findings on trends within your industry.
Clarity, Structure & Semantic Relevance: Like all LLM bots, Perplexitybot is looking for the best information source that is the easiest to understand. Don't make it hard for perplexitybot to read and understand your content. Use questions in headings, and then answer in the body text. Stay on topic! Make sure all the content on your site points to your brand's specific expertise.
Structured data and optimized visuals: Perplexity prioritizes tables, lists, graphs and other visuals that allow it to easily extract information to generate responses. Make sure to use the correct schema mark up types in your content as well, this will increase the chances of your content and visuals being cited.
User experience and engagement: In the age of AI, user experience is more important than ever, for a lot of reasons, and optimizing for AI-search is a big one. For a D2C brand that we analyzed, that had an above industry average pageviews and time on page, resulted in almost complete dominance in AI-search appearance. Use these and other metrics to measure improvements in user experience and engagement, and watch your brand exposure increase.
Off Page:
From tests we have been running with our clients, we found that the first place that an LLM bot will go to find information about your brand and how it fits into the market, is by analyzing the brand’s own domain. The home page, about us page, any solutions, services or product descriptions, are all very common sources of information for the Perplexitybot and other LLMs. Which is great news for marketers and website managers, that is owned content that is generally very easy to optimize. The LLM will go to your brand’s domain for information about what you do and who you serve, then look to external sources in your industry to back up the claims you made on your own domain. The following are off page optimizations that will boost your presence when your audience is searching on Comet.
Mentions on Authoritative, Industry Specific Lists: In traditional SEO, what we might have called “Barnical SEO” is incredibly important for optimizing for search results on Comet, but for a different reason. Barnacle SEO seeks to take up additional real estate on the first page of search results by getting on high ranking lists. Sometimes it is about getting an authoritative backlink from the domain the list lives on. However when optimizing for Comet and other LLMs, you want to get on one of these lists to simply mention your brand and reference you as one of the top brands in your space. Getting as many of these mentions as possible is key for ranking on Perplexity Search, however you should do some research to find what sources Perplexity is often citing for topics in your industry and go after those.
Online Reviews and Reputation: Another way that Perplexity will determine the credibility of claims made on your website and your brand's reputation is by looking at reviews from trusted public review sites such as Google Business Profiles.
Awards, Accreditations, and Affiliations: In case you haven’t noticed, PR campaigns of many different varieties seem to be what produce results when optimizing for LLMs. That includes getting as many people or organizations to talk about your brand across the web as possible. Applying for and seeking after industry relevant awards, and publicizing those awards will provide the credibility the LLMs are looking for about your brand.
How Does Perplexity Search Crawl and Fetch Information from Your Site Differently than Other AI Chat Bots and Search Engines?
Perplexity user experience is much different than OpenAI GPT, Google’s Gemini, or Claude, primarily in its use of source cited and clickable elements in the generative responses. If traffic is still a metric SEOs and website managers are interested in increasing, Perplexity winning the AI race seems to be the best chance website owners have at seeing increases in referral traffic. So how is optimizing for Perplexity Search? Here are a few things to consider:
Java Script Rendering: While Googlebot will render javascript fully, Perplexity does not. With this in mind you will want to prioritize HTML content as it fetches HTML content 57% of the time. Google will also fetch HTML content a majority of the time, however at a much lower rate of 31% of the time.
Crawl Purpose: Google and other traditional search engines crawl web pages with the intent of indexing the pages for future use when a related query is made. Perplexity crawls a web page for immediate use, live retrieval of information and citations. This is also different from Claudebot and OpenAI GPTBot, which crawl web pages for the purpose of model training. This means you should have an excellent site structure that allows for maximum crawling of the content on your site.
Status Code Tolerance: Google is not a fan of 404 errors and they do not like an excessive amount of 301 redirects, which they have been able to keep their number page requests for broken pages and redirects to an impressive 10% or less of total web pages fetched. Perplexity and other AI bots do not seem to attempt to avoid broken or redirected pages, with more than 30% of pages requested returning a 404 error or a 3xx level redirect. While you can take this as an opportunity to not place a heavy emphasis on maintaining live pages and clean xml sitemaps, focusing heavily on these optimizations is likely the smarter option. Like on Google, you will have a crawl budget with perplexitybot and need to ensure the bot is spending its crawl efforts on the most important content on your site.
Experts in Search Marketing Ready to Help you Rank on Comet
The team at 97th Floor is doing the work to find every opportunity to increase brand awareness on new and tried and true platforms. Perplexity’s new browser, Comet, has real potential to be a widely used search engine and make a dent into Google's Search market share dominance. When and if that happens, we will be fully prepared to optimize for Comet. Lets connect, our team will do an AI-search competitive analysis for your brand free of charge, to identify opportunities in AI search and if your audience is already adopting Perplexity Search and using the Comet Browser.
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