What does Perplexity AI mean for Google Search?

Perplexity boasts the following:

• Answers that are accurate and always cited; from a variety of sources across the web.
• Citations in every response; more information is available by clicking through to the sources
• Related questions; follow up questions that are relevant to your search
• Available for desktop or iPhone/android app, with free and pro plans (starting at $20 per month).

There are significant similarities between Perplexity and Google’s newly announced AI Overviews (previously known as Search Generative Experience). Both create an AI-generated answer summary, collated from several sources. The sources are linked to within the answers for users to click through:

This is different from the traditional search engine results page, which either provides a list of sources, or a ‘featured snippet’ summary from one top source. This overall top ‘AI answer’ is a move away from the traditional top-ranking spot, and will have implications on traffic for publishers. With the introduction of ‘AI answers’ in Google Search and Perplexity, websites are now competing to be one of a number of ‘sources’ within a summarised answer.

Both Perplexity and Google AI Overviews provide follow up questions, similar to Google’s long-standing ‘people also ask’ feature - the layout itself is largely familiar with expandable question links:

Focusing on follow-up questions is a core element of preparing for AI answers, and new technologies such as Perplexity and Arc Search further confirm this. The conversational style leans more towards a question-and-answer format, rather than the traditional use of short keyword-based search phrases.

Perplexity has been described as ‘like being given driving directions rather than a fuzzy map’ because, in theory, it removes the need for searchers to click through to different sources for a response. It notably doesn’t include ad integrations which streamlines the overall layout of the answers. When you ask Perplexity what makes it different from Google AI Overviews, or Google more generally, it tells you that Google’s answers are less direct, less interactive, less in-depth and more high-level.

Perplexity has its own web crawler, PerplexityBot, that can be blocked like any other search engine, via a robots.txt file on your website. You can also specify the areas of your site you’d like Perplexity to crawl – or not – via the robots.txt. If you would like your content to appear in Perplexity, you can follow existing best practices for search engine crawlers: make sure your content is accessible, with a clear information architecture and good linking between pages.

Citations are critical for Perplexity, but this isn’t new. Maintaining visibility in Google search right now involves demonstrating high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. Perplexity values well researched content that is accurate and helpful - this is no different to Google and so your high-quality search-informed content design is just as important as ever.

Tactics such as making such your content is helpful, well structured and ‘snippetable’ (providing direct, concise answers) are still entirely valid and add huge value to your website visitors, as well as setting you up to be featured as a source.

Currently, there’s no way of gaining keyword or usage data from Perplexity, so our existing keyword-based optimisation approaches aren’t directly applicable. However, Google maintains the majority of market share and the way people search in traditional search engines can give us a huge amount of insight into the demand for topics. For now, we’ll continue to test Perplexity, Arc Search and other alternatives, but your existing SEO efforts will continue to provide a good foundation for website visibility across the web.