Free tool
Perplexity is a search engine with a model on top. Ask it a buying question and it runs a real web search, pulls a handful of pages, and writes a summary of what those pages say, with the citations numbered down the side. That architecture has one consequence worth understanding: the pages it retrieves are the answer. The model is summarising other people's writing, so if none of the retrieved pages mention you, no amount of good content on your own homepage will get you into that response.
This is why the source list in your result matters more than the verdict. If Perplexity cited four listicles and a Reddit thread, those five pages are what you are actually competing to appear in. Getting a row added to one well-cited comparison article does more for your Perplexity visibility than a month of blogging, and it is a much less satisfying answer than most SEO advice.
Not mentioned, not cited. You are not in the retrieved pages at all. Read the sources it did use and work out which of them you could plausibly get into.
Mentioned, not cited. Somebody else's page named you and Perplexity repeated it. Good, and out of your hands. Your own domain being cited is the version you can defend.
Mentioned and cited. Perplexity read your site and used it. Note which page it took, because that page is now doing real work and is worth expanding rather than leaving alone.
A rank number appears when the answer listed several options in order. Position three in a list of eight is a meaningfully different situation from position one, and both beat being absent.
A single run is a snapshot of one question, on one engine, on one day. Perplexity re-searches every time, so the answer moves. If you want to know whether a page you published changed anything, you need the same set of questions asked repeatedly over weeks, and you need to watch the source list rather than just the yes/no. That tracking is what CueScout sells. This page is free because one honest snapshot is usually enough to tell you whether you have a problem.
Next
It sends your question to Perplexity through its live search-grounded API, reads the answer, and reports three things: whether your brand name appears in the text, whether your domain appears in the citation list, and which other brands got named alongside you. One question, one run, no signup.
Because they source answers differently. Perplexity runs a search and cites the pages it read, usually five to ten of them, with numbered links you can click. ChatGPT is more likely to answer partly from what the model already absorbed during training and cite less. That means a page can earn you a Perplexity citation quickly while barely moving your ChatGPT visibility, and the reverse also happens. Checking one and assuming the other is how people end up confused about why their traffic did not change.
Mentioned means the answer text contains your brand name. Cited means your domain is in the source list the answer was built from. Mentioned without cited is common and it is usually the more fragile of the two: the model knows your name from somewhere but did not read your site this time, so the mention can disappear on the next run. Cited is the sturdier signal.
No, that is genuinely how these engines behave. The underlying search results move, and the model samples its wording. This is the honest limitation of any single check, including this one, and it is why we do not put a big score on the result. One run tells you whether you are plausibly in the picture. Deciding whether a change you made actually worked needs the same question asked repeatedly over weeks.
Look at the sources it did cite, which the result lists for you. Those pages are the answer. If they are best-of lists and comparison articles you are not on, the fix is getting into those pages, not editing your homepage. If they are competitor blog posts, the fix is publishing the better version of that page on your own domain. Almost none of the work is on your own site, which is the part people find annoying and is also why it works.
No. The check runs and returns the result. Nothing is written to a database. Tracking the same questions on a schedule is the paid product, which runs against a brand you have added to your own account.