How it discovers and cites pages
Perplexity runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot, and supplements it with third-party search indexes to assemble a fresh set of candidate sources for each query. It reads those pages, synthesizes an answer, and attaches numbered citations that map each claim back to a specific source URL. Because it re-retrieves per query, recency and a clear, directly-quotable answer to the question both improve your odds of being cited.
What this means for getting cited
To be cited by Perplexity, your page first has to be reachable through the index it draws on (Own crawler (PerplexityBot) plus third-party search APIs) and crawlable by the relevant bots, then it has to answer the user's question clearly enough to be quoted. I test exactly these variables at HZ and publish what moves the needle.