Perplexity

Perplexity is an answer engine built around citations: it runs a live web search for almost every query and shows numbered sources alongside the answer. It is one of the five engines Lokrix runs live by default, via the Sonar API.

How it grounds

Rather than a single index, Perplexity runs its own live search across both Google and Bing, then reads and summarises the top results. Two behaviours stand out and shape optimisation: it over-weights Reddit — roughly 47% of its top citations — and it strongly favours freshness, preferring recent pages over older ones.

How each answer engine grounds its answersSeven answer engines on the left connect to their grounding sources on the right: ChatGPT to the Bing index; Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini to the Google index and Search; Perplexity, Grok and Claude to live web search.ChatGPTGoogle AI OverviewsGoogle AI ModePerplexityGeminiGrok (xAI)ClaudeBing indexGoogle index / SearchLive web search

What moves your score

  • Earned media, especially Reddit: relevant, upvoted threads that mention or recommend you are disproportionately likely to be cited. Wikipedia and G2 corroboration help too.
  • Freshness: recently published or updated pages are favoured — stale content loses ground fast.
  • Dual-index ranking: because it searches Google and Bing, rank on both matters.
  • Quotations, statistics and cited sources in your content — the top on-page lever (Princeton GEO, KDD 2024).

Perplexity's Reddit-weighting makes earned-media corroboration one of the highest-leverage moves — see the levers. Each run is sampled K times for a presence probability with a 95% confidence interval; see sampling & confidence.