Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Perplexity is an AI answer engine. Instead of showing a traditional list of links like Google, it writes a direct answer to a question and cites the sources it used. It combines search results with AI-generated summaries, aiming to give users an immediate, trustworthy response.
Researcher Metehan Yesilyurt has investigated how Perplexity might decide which sources appear in its answers. While these findings are not officially confirmed, they give useful clues for anyone working in SEO or content marketing.
Why this matters
If you want your brand to be mentioned or cited inside AI answers, it helps to understand what kinds of signals may improve visibility. These insights suggest how to choose topics, structure content and act quickly on trends.
Key takeaways from the research
- Quality matters more than keywords.
Perplexity uses a “three-layer reranker” for entity searches. It starts with a normal search, then applies stricter machine learning filters. If not enough results meet the quality standard, it removes them all and looks again. Thin or purely keyword-based content is unlikely to appear, so building topical authority is important. - Some sites get a manual trust boost.
The system appears to give extra weight to certain trusted domains such as Amazon, LinkedIn, GitHub and Coursera. Being linked from or referencing these platforms could pass some of that trust to your content. - Trending topics and YouTube can work together.
If a YouTube video title exactly matches a trending Perplexity query, it may get more visibility on both platforms. Acting quickly on emerging topics can help capture this effect. - Engagement and freshness drive rankings.
Early clicks and interaction with a new post act like a vote of confidence and can extend its visibility. Content loses traction over time, so updating it regularly can help. - Depth and interlinking help visibility.
Perplexity prefers comprehensive content that fully answers the question and related queries. Linking related pages together into a hub can strengthen authority. - Negative signals can bury content.
Repetitive or low-quality pages, poor feedback, or too much overlap between articles can harm visibility. Consolidating similar content and focusing on unique value is better.
How might marketers use Perplexity?
- Monitor trending questions in your industry and create content that answers them in detail.
- Publish supporting YouTube videos with titles that match those trending queries.
- Build topic clusters with a main hub page and interlinked articles.
- Refresh and update top-performing pages to maintain visibility.
- Where relevant, reference credible, high-authority sources.
- Promote new content quickly through email, social media and other channels to spark early engagement.
The tactics for doing well in Perplexity are very similar to solid SEO practice. Focus on creating high-quality, comprehensive content, keep it fresh, make it easy for users to engage, and build real authority in your niche.
