Free Perplexity Brand Check: See What Perplexity Says About You

A logged-out Perplexity test answers three practical questions.

• Are you named? For the questions a buyer would ask, does Perplexity mention your brand at all, and where in the answer?
• Are the facts right? Pricing, product names, location, features. A wrong price is a different problem from a missing mention.
• Where did it look? Perplexity cites whole sources by number. Each number maps to a URL. That list is the most useful part of the result, because it shows the pages shaping the answer.

Perplexity answers with live web retrieval in its consumer app, so the sources are usually visible. That makes it easier to diagnose than an answer with no citations. If the answer is wrong, the numbered sources usually point to the cause. Our guide on what to check when Perplexity is wrong about your company goes deeper on fixes.

Plan about 30 minutes for three questions. Use a spreadsheet with columns for date, question, run number, brand named (yes or no), facts stated, and source URLs.

1. Open a private browser window and go to https://www.perplexity.ai. Do not sign in. Logged-in history and settings can change answers, so a logged-out session is closer to what a new buyer sees.
2. Leave the model on the default. As of October 2026, secondary reports describe the free app's default as "Best", an auto-router that picks a model per question. Pro and Max users can choose from a menu of models. You are testing the default most buyers get.
3. Write three buyer questions. Use questions a buyer types before they know your name. Say you run a dental clinic in Austin: "best dentist in Austin for implants", "how much do dental implants cost in Austin", and "is [your clinic] good for implants". Mix one category question, one price or comparison question, and one question that names you.
4. Ask each question in a fresh thread. Follow-ups inherit context and skew the answer.
5. Copy the full answer text into your sheet. Screenshots help, but text is easier to compare later.
6. Record every numbered source. Open the sources panel and copy each URL and its number. Note which claim each number supports.
7. Repeat each question two more times, ideally on different days. Because routing and retrieval vary, three runs show you what is stable and what is noise.
8. Date everything. A result without a date can't be compared with next month's.

Run the same questions on other engines to see where answers differ. The free Claude brand check and free Gemini brand check follow the same method.

Perplexity uses two agents, and they follow different rules.

• PerplexityBot crawls for Perplexity's search index. Perplexity's crawler documentation says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Blocking it in robots.txt keeps your pages out of that index.
• Perplexity-User fetches a page when a person's question calls for it. Perplexity's documentation says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. Blocking it there is not a reliable control.

First, look at your robots.txt at https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A rule that lets PerplexityBot in looks like this:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Watch for a blanket User-agent: * with Disallow: /, or an AI-bot block list copied from elsewhere. Either can silently remove you from the index.

Second, robots.txt is not the only gate. A firewall or CDN can turn away a crawler that robots.txt allows. A rough test from a terminal:

curl -I -A "PerplexityBot" https://yourdomain.com/pricing

A 200 is a pass. A 403 or a challenge page means something at the network layer is blocking. Use the full user-agent string from Perplexity's crawler page for a closer match. The AI Crawler Checker runs this request as each AI crawler and shows which ones the firewall turns away.

Third, check that your key facts sit in the raw HTML. Vercel's crawler study found that ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them, and independent testing in June 2026 found the same for PerplexityBot. A price that only appears after JavaScript runs may be invisible to it.

Sort each answer into one of four outcomes. Each points to a different next move.

For wrong facts, the source number tells you where to look. If it's your own page, check that the page states the fact plainly and that it's in the HTML. A specific sentence ("Implants start at $X") gives the engine something to quote. If it's an old third-party page, the fix is getting that page corrected. For stale claims, see what to do when AI describes features you dropped, and use hallucination vs outdated answer to tell the two apart.

When Perplexity cites review sites, directories or comparison articles instead of you, being named on those sites is the route into the answer. The evidence shows a strong association there, not a guaranteed effect.

Be plain with yourself about the limits.

• It is a sample. The free app routes across models, and retrieval happens per question. Three runs of three questions is a snapshot, not a trend. See whether switching AI models changes brand answers.
• Your questions are a proxy. Perplexity may rewrite or expand a question before it searches. Nobody outside Perplexity sees those internal queries.
• Citation is not the same as influence. A source can shape an answer without a number next to it.
• The app is not the API. Perplexity's Agent API requires opting web search in. Code that calls it without search returns ungrounded answers, so API-based checks can differ from what the app shows.
• No rank exists. There is no position in a Perplexity answer to track, only whether you're named, what is said, and what is cited.

What you control is access: robots.txt, network reachability, and facts stated in fetchable HTML. What you don't control is which sources Perplexity selects or how it words the answer. Treat any fix as removing a block, not buying a placement.

The manual test works, but repeating it across engines and dates takes time. The free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions (your own, or written from your homepage) and scores the answers. It is a snapshot like the manual test, not continuous tracking. If you want to see which of your pages get cited across engines, the free AI citation checker focuses on sources. Whichever you use, keep the dated record: it is the baseline you will compare every fix against.