How does Perplexity decide which law firms to cite?

That's a different starting point from ChatGPT, which decides whether a question needs a search. On Perplexity the search is the default, and the citations are on screen from the first answer. A person can switch web sources off entirely with the "Choose sources" control, but most people asking about a lawyer won't.

Paid users can pick which model writes the answer, and Perplexity's Research mode runs many searches for one question. The model changes the writing. The pages it can cite still come from Perplexity's search, which is the part a law firm can influence.

Because the citations are visible, Perplexity users tend to click them. In practice the cited page is the firm's first impression, so it has to read well cold, without the rest of the site around it.

So blocking doesn't make a firm invisible. It makes it thin: Perplexity can still know the firm exists, without the practice pages that explain what it handles, where, and how the process works.

A competitor whose pages are readable gets cited for the substance.

Perplexity also says it partners with third-party crawlers to help build its index and has updated those agreements so the providers respect robots.txt too. A blanket disallow aimed at "AI bots" can reach further than the firm intended.

What the labels mean

Government marks official government sites, and Perplexity says it helps with legal questions, financial matters and government services. Academic marks scientific sites. Trusted is a broad label for sites that appear often in results and publish within their own area of expertise.

What the review checks

Perplexity gives example questions: does the site correct its mistakes, does it say who wrote each piece, and does it keep news separate from advertising and opinion. It says partnerships and payments don't affect labels, and that most domains have no label, which isn't a negative judgment.

What it means for a law firm

Perplexity doesn't say labels change which sources get cited; they're shown to the reader. But on legal questions, a firm's page will often sit next to a court, bar or immigration agency site wearing the Government label. Pages that cite those official sources, name the lawyer who wrote or reviewed them, and show a real "Last updated" date hold up in that company.

That's the standard we write client pages to: the answer in the first two or three sentences, official sources linked on the page, and a lawyer's name on it only when that lawyer actually reviewed it. It's also how we build law firm websites.

• Ask five questions the way clients phrase them, with and without your city named.
• Open every numbered citation and note the domain, whether it names your firm, and whether the details are right.
• Run each question more than once; we record the share of runs that name the firm, not a single screenshot.
• Repeat monthly with the same questions, and compare against the first run.

Perplexity is one of the tools in the monthly checks we run for AI search clients, alongside ChatGPT and Google. Visits from it show up in analytics as referrals, and we group them with the other AI tools so firms can see the trend. Our guide to measuring AI search traffic shows how.

Our clearest AI search results so far come from ChatGPT: one family law firm now shows up first there. Another firm moved into estate planning and started being found inside ChatGPT and similar tools.

The groundwork behind both is the groundwork Perplexity reads, and a six-month reputation build for a new business law firm is the same kind of work. The action plan for AI visibility lists it step by step, and the full prompt method is in our guide to checking what AI says about your firm.