Perplexity SEO in Singapore: How to Get Cited (October 2026)

Perplexity chooses its sources by searching its own web index for each question, scoring the passages that answer it, and citing the pages those passages came from. Perplexity's help centre says the search happens in real time.

In September 2025 Perplexity's research team published a technical write-up of its search system. Three parts of it matter for a business website:

• The index is Perplexity's own. It tracks more than 200 billion unique URLs. A model decides how often each page is revisited, based on how important it looks and how often it changes.
• Passages are scored as well as pages. Perplexity splits each document into self-contained spans and ranks them separately. A clear paragraph halfway down your services page can be the part that gets quoted.
• Keywords and meaning both count. Every query runs through keyword matching and meaning-based retrieval, and rerankers sort the merged shortlist. Content judged stale or unresponsive is filtered out before ranking starts.

Ordinary search rankings still carry a lot of weight. When Ahrefs ran 15,000 long-tail queries through four AI assistants in August 2025, 28.6% of the URLs Perplexity cited also ranked in Google's top 10 for the same query. The average across the four assistants was about 12%, and Ahrefs called Perplexity the outlier. A page that already ranks in Google for "corporate secretary services Singapore" has a head start on Perplexity for the same question.

Perplexity is worth checking every month, but nobody has published a credible figure for how many people in Singapore use it, so I don't build a whole strategy around it. I looked for one from a survey firm or a government source and found nothing. The global figures that circulate mostly trace back to the company or to statistics blogs quoting each other.

What we do know is that Singtel gave Perplexity Pro away. In January 2025 it announced a free year of Perplexity Pro for its broadband, TV and mobile customers. Singtel's FAQ for one version of the offer valued it at about SGD 270 for each mobile line, took redemptions from 23 January to 13 July 2025, and said accounts would drop back to the free version after 12 months with no charge. Under those terms, most of those free years had run out by the middle of 2026.

Perplexity's Comet browser became free on 2 October 2025 and reached Android in November 2025 and iPhone in March 2026.

Perplexity's shopping checkout with PayPal launched for US users in November 2025. Its local data deals so far are with Yelp, Tripadvisor for hotels and OpenTable for restaurant bookings. If you run a hotel, restaurant or tour business here, keep your Tripadvisor listing current, since Tripadvisor is also among the domains Perplexity cites most.

PerplexityBot crawls the web to build Perplexity's search index and follows robots.txt, while Perplexity-User fetches a page live when someone's question needs it and generally ignores robots.txt. Both are described in Perplexity's crawler documentation, which also says neither one is used to train AI foundation models.

If you want to be cited, allow both. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: PerplexityBot", or under "User-agent: *", which covers every crawler that doesn't have its own rule. Perplexity says a change can take up to 24 hours to register.

If your site sits behind Cloudflare or a host's firewall, that layer can turn a crawler away before robots.txt is read at all. That firewall layer is one of the first things I check in a technical SEO audit.

In August 2025 Cloudflare accused Perplexity of disguising its crawlers to get into sites that had blocked them, and Perplexity said Cloudflare had mistaken another company's traffic for its own. Both published on 4 August 2025.

Cloudflare's post said it registered fresh domains nobody could have found, disallowed all crawling in robots.txt, and asked Perplexity about them. Perplexity still answered in detail. According to Cloudflare, once the declared bots were blocked, requests arrived under a generic Chrome-on-macOS user agent from IP addresses outside Perplexity's published ranges, at 3 to 6 million requests a day. Cloudflare removed Perplexity from its verified bots list and added rules to block that traffic.

Perplexity's reply argued that an assistant fetching a page because a person asked a question is different from a crawler building a database, and said those fetches are neither stored nor used for training. It said Cloudflare had likely confused its traffic with requests from BrowserBase, a cloud browser service Perplexity uses only occasionally, and that its own BrowserBase use came to fewer than 45,000 requests a day.

I can't tell you who was right, and a business owner doesn't need to settle it. The row does show that robots.txt is a request, and AI companies read it differently. If you want Perplexity to cite you, let both of its agents in and make sure your firewall isn't blocking them. If you want Perplexity out, robots.txt alone won't do it.

Cloudflare's controls have changed since. Its July 2026 update split AI traffic into Search, Agent and Training groups, and from 15 September 2026 new domains joining Cloudflare start with Training and Agent bots blocked on pages that show ads, while Search stays allowed. The settings sit under Security Settings in Configure AI bot policies. Cloudflare's pages on the new groups don't say which one each Perplexity agent falls into, so after any change, check your firewall events for both user agents.

Perplexity cites Reddit more than any other domain, and three times as often as Google AI Overviews does, according to Profound's study of 680 million AI citations. Profound tracked citations on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity from August 2024 to June 2025. These were its top domains for Perplexity, as a share of all Perplexity citations:

• Reddit, 6.6% (against 2.2% on Google AI Overviews and 1.8% on ChatGPT)
• YouTube, 2.0%
• Yelp and LinkedIn, 0.8% each
• TripAdvisor and G2, 0.6% each

Those shares look small because the long tail is enormous. Among Perplexity's ten most cited domains, Reddit alone took 46.7% of the citations and YouTube took 13.9%.

Treat those numbers as a snapshot. The data stops in mid-2025, and in October 2025 Reddit sued Perplexity and three data companies over alleged large-scale scraping of Reddit comments, a claim Perplexity said it would fight. I wouldn't build a plan that depends on Reddit's share staying where it was.

Fresh pages get a small edge, and old pages still get cited. In July 2025 Ahrefs published an analysis of about 17 million AI citations. The pages Perplexity cited were on average 1,166 days old, against about 1,400 days for pages ranking in Google's organic results, and Perplexity appeared to list its citations from newest to oldest. If it does, an updated page with this year's prices stands a better chance of being source number one.

For a Singapore business, that points to a short list of places off your own site: LinkedIn if you sell to other businesses, YouTube if customers want to see the work, Tripadvisor for food, stays and tours, and threads on Reddit's r/singapore where people ask for recommendations. You can't post your way into Reddit threads with fake accounts, and you shouldn't try. You can give real customers a reason to mention you there.

A Singapore business gets cited by Perplexity when it has a page that answers the customer's exact question in a passage worth quoting, on a site Perplexity can crawl, backed by mentions on sites Perplexity already cites. Most of the work is ordinary SEO, written for the way people phrase questions.

1. Write the page the question deserves. If customers ask "best accountant for SMEs in Singapore", a homepage line about "trusted accounting solutions" gives Perplexity nothing to quote. A page that says who you serve (say, private limited companies with under SGD 5 million in revenue), what's included, your fee range in SGD and which ACRA and IRAS deadlines you handle gives it several sentences to lift.
2. Answer in the first two sentences under each heading. Perplexity scores passages on their own, so a paragraph that only makes sense after the one above it is harder to quote. Put the subject, the place and the number in the same sentence.
3. Name the neighbourhood. "We serve all of Singapore" matches nobody's question. A renovation firm with a page on HDB resale renovations in Punggol and Sengkang, showing past project types, whether it's listed in HDB's Directory of Renovation Contractors and a typical timeline in weeks, matches the question people type.
4. Add schema for Google's sake. Perplexity hasn't said it reads structured data. Google does, and pages that rank in Google turn up more often in Perplexity's citations, so LocalBusiness and Organization schema is worth the hour.
5. Get onto the pages it already cites. If the numbered sources for your question are a "best renovation contractors in Singapore" roundup and two Reddit threads, get listed on the roundup and read the threads for what customers worry about.

Every month I run the same set of customer questions through Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and note which businesses each engine names. It's part of my SEO retainer rather than an extra product, because the work that gets a page ranked is the same work that gets it quoted.

In month one, the client and I pick the questions together, worded the way their customers would type them. For an aircon servicing company in Tampines that might be "aircon chemical wash Tampines price" or "who can service a Daikin system 4 near Tampines". After that the set stays fixed, so one month's answers can be compared with the next.

Perplexity is the engine where I write the most down. As well as which businesses get named, I note the numbered sources behind each answer: whether the client's own page is one of them, which competitor pages are, and which third-party sites keep turning up. A site that appears month after month is usually where the next piece of work is. How the other three engines pick and show their sources is covered in separate posts on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.

I don't report a "rank" for each question. In SparkToro's January 2026 study, volunteers ran the same prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI 60 to 100 times each, and for ChatGPT and Google's AI there was less than a 1 in 100 chance of the same list of brands coming back twice. Perplexity wasn't tested, and I see no reason to assume it's steadier. Being named across the whole set, month after month, tells you more than where you sat on one run.

You can check your own Perplexity visibility in about an hour with ten customer questions, a private browser window and a spreadsheet.

1. Write down ten questions a customer would ask before hiring you, in their words. Mix in a "best X in Singapore" question, a neighbourhood ("near Jurong East"), a price question and a comparison.
2. Open a private window or log out. Perplexity says its shopping results draw on past searches, and a clean session is closer to what a stranger sees.
3. Run each question three times. For each run, record whether you're named, who is, and the website behind every numbered source.
4. Open the cited pages. Note what they say that your site doesn't, such as a price, a suburb, a licence or a comparison table.
5. Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt for rules blocking PerplexityBot. If you use Cloudflare, check the AI bot policies under Security Settings too.
6. Ask Perplexity about your business by name. If it gets your services, area or contact details wrong, its sources show you which listing to correct.

Then fix the cheapest gap first. Unblocking a crawler takes five minutes. Rewriting a service page so it answers the question properly takes an afternoon. Getting onto a roundup that Perplexity keeps citing can take months.

Visits from Perplexity that carry a referrer show up in GA4 with a source containing "perplexity", and a custom channel group gives them their own line in your reports. Google's help page on custom channel groups includes an "AI assistants" example whose pattern catches Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Here's a simpler version:

1. In GA4, go to Admin, then Data display, then Channel groups.
2. Copy the default channel group and add a channel called "AI assistants".
3. Set its condition to Source matches regex, with a pattern such as .*perplexity.*|.*chatgpt.*|.*openai.*|.*gemini.*|.*copilot.*
4. Move the new channel above Referral. GA4 puts each session in the first channel it matches, so a channel placed below Referral would stay empty.
5. Save. Google says custom channel groups apply to your reports retroactively.

The number will undercount. A visit that arrives without a referrer, such as someone pasting a link from an answer into a new tab, lands in Direct, and no channel rule can recover it. I treat the AI assistants line as a floor and read it next to the enquiries that came in.

Ads, the publisher programme, reflex bot-blocking, leaning on llms.txt and paying for guaranteed AI rankings won't get a Singapore SME cited by Perplexity, and some of them cost you visibility.

• Ads. Perplexity is winding down its advertising programme by the end of 2026, B&T reported from the Financial Times in February 2026. Fewer than half a percent of brands that applied to advertise were admitted, and executives said ads risk making users "suspicious of everything".
• The publisher programme. Perplexity's Publishers' Program launched in July 2024 with TIME, Der Spiegel and Fortune among its first partners. Comet Plus, from August 2025, shares subscription revenue with publishers. Both are deals for news outlets. Neither will get a Bukit Timah tuition centre cited.
• Blocking AI bots by reflex. A blanket "block AI bots" setting keeps PerplexityBot away from the pages you want cited. For a service business that wants enquiries, that's a bad trade.
• Treating llms.txt as the fix. Perplexity's crawler documentation covers robots.txt and IP lists and doesn't mention llms.txt. My llms.txt guide shows how to set one up, but the file won't rescue a page that doesn't answer the question.
• Guaranteed AI rankings. Answers change from run to run, and nobody outside Perplexity controls what it cites, so a promised "position" on Perplexity means very little. Ask any vendor how many times they run each question and what exactly they count.