The problem this solves
Perplexity answers with citations, which makes it the one engine where visibility is closest to measurable - and the one where losing is most visible, because the competitor being cited is right there in the footnotes. Teams that track Google obsessively often have no idea what Perplexity says about their category this week.
Spot-checking by hand does not survive contact with reality: answers vary by phrasing, presence needs a consistent prompt set to be comparable over time, and the interesting number is the trend, not the snapshot. One person checking five prompts monthly in a browser produces anecdotes, not measurement.
Running the check under your own API key matters too: your volume, your cost control, your account - the measurement program scales with your prompt set instead of someone else's quota.
The stakes compound because Perplexity answers travel. Its cited answers get screenshotted into slide decks, pasted into procurement notes and quoted in internal recommendations, so a citation there is not one impression but a seed that reproduces in documents you will never see. Measuring monthly with a consistent set is how you find out whether that seeding is happening for you or for the competitor whose comparison page keeps appearing in footnote two.
How the mission runs
- Run the tracked prompt set. The agent runs your workspace's tracked prompts against Perplexity through your connected key - the same set every time, which is what makes month-over-month movement mean something.
- Score presence and citations per answer. For each answer: are you named, are you cited, at what position, and which competitors appear. Citation domains are captured, because being cited is the durable form of AI visibility.
- Diff against the previous run. Every prompt's result is compared with last month: presence gained, presence lost, new competitor entries, citation source changes. The diff is the deliverable a strategy meeting can actually use.
- Read the sources behind the answers. The most-cited domains for your category are analyzed for what makes them citable - format, freshness, specificity - feeding directly into what your content should do next.
- Deliver the scorecard. A concise scorecard lands with the headline movements, the full per-prompt table as CSV, and the three most actionable citation gaps.
The prompt
This is the exact objective the agent receives. Swap the obvious placeholders for your own domain, segment or channel and run it as-is from the console, Slack, or the API.
What comes back
A Perplexity visibility scorecard with per-prompt presence and citations, a month-over-month diff, and the three citation gaps most worth attacking.
Make it yours
- Schedule it monthly so the diff builds into a real trend line over quarters.
- Run the same set through the other tracked engines in one mission for a cross-engine share-of-voice view.
- Focus one run entirely on a product launch: the launch prompt set, weekly, for six weeks.
- Feed the citation-gap findings straight to the content agent: the three domains Perplexity trusts most for your category become the target list for the next guest-content and digital-PR push, closing the loop from measurement to action inside one workspace.
Frequently asked questions
Why does this need my own Perplexity key?
Volume and control: your prompt set can grow without sharing a quota, costs land on your account transparently, and the connection is yours to revoke any time.
How is this different from the built-in AI visibility checks?
It complements them: the platform tracks the major engines continuously, and this playbook adds Perplexity depth under your key - citations, sources and diffs on your exact prompt set.
What makes an answer count as presence?
Being named in the answer text or cited in its sources, recorded separately - a citation without a mention and a mention without a citation are different problems with different fixes.