Your competitor isn't necessarily better than you. They're just more legible to AI. Here's what Perplexity is actually seeing when it chooses them over you.
Try it right now. Open Perplexity and type “best [your service] in [your city].” If a competitor’s name appears and yours doesn’t, there’s a specific reason. It’s not random, and it’s not because your competitor is better at their job.
It’s because your competitor is more legible to AI.
Understanding what that means — and what to do about it — is the whole game.
Unlike the base ChatGPT model, which draws on training data, Perplexity is a retrieval system. When someone searches for a local service, Perplexity goes and fetches current web content, processes what it finds, and synthesises an answer from those sources.
This means the question isn’t “which business has been around longer” or “which business does better work.” The question is: “which business has the most credible, specific, and consistently cited presence across the sources Perplexity is retrieving right now?”
If your competitor is appearing and you’re not, Perplexity found better evidence for them.
When Perplexity retrieves content for a local service query, it’s looking across several evidence types simultaneously.
Review volume and recency. Perplexity indexes Google reviews, Facebook reviews, and industry-specific review platforms. A business with 90 Google reviews averaging 4.8 stars, with 12 reviews added in the past three months, reads as active, trusted, and popular. A business with 18 reviews — even if all are five stars — reads as less established. If your competitor has significantly more reviews, this is likely the single biggest factor.
Independent citations. Perplexity heavily weights content from sources other than your own website. A mention in a local news article, a listing in a trade association directory, a case study on an industry publication, or a suburb-specific roundup written by a third party all carry more weight than anything on your own domain. This is because independent citations are harder to manufacture — they signal genuine external validation.
Content specificity. Perplexity matches queries to content. If someone searches “commercial refrigeration repair Brisbane,” and your competitor has a dedicated page titled “Commercial Refrigeration Repair in Brisbane” with detailed content about the specific services, common faults, and service areas — and you have a single “Our Services” page listing refrigeration as one of nine items — Perplexity retrieves their content as a more specific match.
Structured data. JSON-LD schema markup on a website gives Perplexity machine-readable declarations of your business name, category, location, phone number, and services. Without it, Perplexity has to infer this from your written copy — which is less reliable and lower confidence. Our AI Search Optimisation service includes full schema implementation for exactly this reason.
Google Business Profile completeness. Perplexity pulls Google Business Profile data as part of its local retrieval. A fully completed profile — categories, services, photos, regular posts, Q&A section answered — is retrievable in a way a sparse or incomplete profile isn’t. If your competitor posts to their GBP regularly and you haven’t touched yours in a year, that gap is visible to Perplexity.
Don’t guess. Go and look at what your competitor is doing that you’re not.
Search their business name on Google and note what comes up: directory listings, news mentions, trade association memberships, review platforms. That’s their citation footprint. Compare it to yours.
Check their Google review count and how recently reviews have been posted. Check their Google Business Profile — how many photos, are services listed, when did they last post?
Visit their website and look for pages dedicated to specific services or specific suburbs. Look for FAQ sections, for question-led headings, for schema markup in the page source (right-click, View Source, search for application/ld+json).
You’re not looking to copy them. You’re building a map of the evidence gaps you need to close.
The good news is that Perplexity’s retrieval-based system is responsive to changes relatively quickly — often within days or weeks of new content being published or new citations appearing. This is fundamentally different from traditional search engine rankings, which can take months to shift after on-page changes.
Publishing a well-structured service page that directly answers specific queries in your category can influence Perplexity results faster than you might expect. Getting a mention in a local news article or trade publication can shift results meaningfully. Getting a consistent stream of new Google reviews — which show up in Perplexity’s evidence base — makes a measurable difference.
The full strategy involves a systematic review of each signal type: citation building and NAP consistency, Google Business Profile optimisation, website content restructured for AI retrieval, and schema markup. But you don’t need to do everything at once. You need to identify which gaps are largest for your specific situation and close those first.
An AI Visibility Audit maps exactly this — where you currently sit against competitors across each of those signal types, and which changes will have the most impact on your Perplexity and ChatGPT visibility. If you’d rather skip the audit and get started directly, contact us and we’ll work through it together.
Your competitor isn’t winning because of something permanent. They’re winning because of something measurable. Measurable things can be changed.
Why does Perplexity show the wrong business when I search my company name?
If Perplexity is pulling up incorrect information about your business — wrong address, old phone number, outdated services — it’s usually because it’s retrieving stale data from a third-party directory or old webpage that hasn’t been updated. The fix is to audit your citation footprint: find every directory that lists your business and make sure the name, address, phone number, and website URL are identical and current. Perplexity weights consistent data across multiple sources; if one source contradicts the others, the inconsistency reduces its confidence in all of them.
Does Perplexity use Google reviews in its recommendations?
Yes. Perplexity retrieves and processes Google Business Profile data, including review ratings and counts. It also indexes reviews from other platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and industry-specific directories. Your Google review count and average rating are among the most visible trust signals Perplexity surfaces when generating a local business recommendation. Businesses with more reviews, higher ratings, and more recent review activity consistently appear more prominently.
Can I contact Perplexity to get my business listed?
There is no submission process for getting your business “listed” in Perplexity the way there is with a directory. Perplexity retrieves content from the live web — if your business has a well-structured website, a complete Google Business Profile, and is mentioned in credible external sources, Perplexity will find it. You build your way in by improving your web presence, not by submitting to Perplexity directly.
How is Perplexity different from ChatGPT for local business searches?
Perplexity is primarily a real-time retrieval system — it fetches live web content every time someone searches. Changes you make to your website or Google Business Profile can influence Perplexity results within days. ChatGPT (in its base model, without Search mode) draws on training data captured at a fixed point in time, so it’s less responsive to recent changes. ChatGPT Search mode works more like Perplexity — live retrieval, faster response to new content. For local businesses, Perplexity is often the more immediately responsive platform to optimise for, while ChatGPT base model visibility is built more slowly through consistent web presence.
Is it worth optimising for Perplexity if most of my customers use Google?
The question understates what Perplexity represents. It’s not just one more search platform — it’s the leading indicator of how AI-native search behaviour is evolving. The people using Perplexity today are typically higher-income, more tech-forward, and often in research mode for significant purchase decisions. Beyond that, optimising for Perplexity visibility — citations, content specificity, review volume, structured data — directly strengthens your Google rankings and Google AI Overview presence at the same time. The work compounds across platforms.
Before ChatGPT names a local business, it asks itself a series of sub-questions. Most businesses answer one or two. The businesses that get recommended answer four or five.
When you ask ChatGPT to recommend a local business, it doesn't just answer your question. It silently breaks it into 5–10 smaller questions first. The business that answers the most of those wins.
Most local businesses haven't started optimising for AI search yet. The ones that act now will build a compounding advantage that latecomers will struggle to close.
Start with a free AI visibility snapshot and see exactly where your business stands across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google.
