{"pageUrl":"https://promagen.com/how-perplexity-ranks-sources","lastModified":"2026-05-10","provenanceHash":"sha256:d4bb634501347fcf28858084a77c706ed607c8299d3af12130318caee5607ac4","provenanceNote":"Perplexity bot names and robots.txt compliance reference Perplexity's published crawler documentation. The always-visible source-list contract describes the product UI as of 2026-05-10. This page does not claim knowledge of Perplexity's internal retrieval or ranking algorithms.","claims":[{"id":"claim-perplexity-bots-documented","statement":"Perplexity publicly documents PerplexityBot as its autonomous citation indexer, controlled by robots.txt allow/disallow directives. Perplexity also documents Perplexity-User as a user-triggered fetcher; Perplexity has stated that Perplexity-User generally does not treat robots.txt as binding because the request is user-initiated.","evidenceUrl":"https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:3d03feb88acd519795d36d3a2ee5bfe0dc5056af68243c92f82d0d2756ed50dd"},{"id":"claim-always-visible-sources","statement":"Perplexity's answer interface displays numbered source citations on every answer as a product design contract; citations are visible by default in the standard Perplexity UI.","evidenceUrl":"https://www.perplexity.ai","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:68d5cd3feded44f2589876981ed8592031f3076e9b1c916a445fe1af76023deb"},{"id":"claim-ranking-not-published","statement":"Perplexity does not publish a complete source-ranking algorithm. Specific claims about weighting, freshness scoring, or backlink influence on ranking are inference from observable output, not documented contracts.","evidenceUrl":"https://promagen.com/sentinel/weekly","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:e84060e1e52afa27eed5b065fc1e48dff857d2dcfbc57f3cead244b62b356383"}]}