Why is Perplexity worth measuring?
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity are the counted set, each scored and reported separately (Mindflow's published methodology). Perplexity shows its citations openly. That makes it the easiest of the three counted surfaces to learn from: you can see which sources it drew on, which tells you where the answer about your category is actually being written.
For diagnosis that is worth more than the score itself. A Perplexity answer that cites four directories and no business websites tells you exactly where the work has to happen.
Does Perplexity move independently of the other counted surfaces?
Yes. In our own measurement, Perplexity has moved while the other two surfaces held flat, sometimes because a comparison page or directory entered or left its source set, not because anything about the business changed. This is the argument for per-surface reporting and for keeping raw responses.
A blended score would have shown a change with no way to tell whether it was your position, a competitor's gain, or a shift in what the engine consulted. Those three call for completely different responses.
What should you do about Perplexity?
Work the sources it cites. Because it discloses them, the target list is unusually legible, and correcting how you are represented on those sources is more direct than any on-site change. Chapter 07 of this guide covers which citation surfaces AI engines look at, and chapter 06 covers reviews as AI input.
Rankings are never guaranteed. Anything we could not trace to a primary source is absent from this page, not estimated. The audit runs the same six layers described on the pricing page, and Share of Answer is scored quarterly.
Read in order, or jump
The order here is the order of the work: twelve chapters, the first four structural, the last of them covering two platforms we decline to score and why we decline.
01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample itSee where you actually stand
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