Perplexity works differently from ChatGPT in a way that genuinely matters for this specific check, and it's worth understanding clearly before drawing any firm conclusions: it's built primarily as a search and research tool, actively citing live web sources for most answers rather than relying purely on training data alone. That makes it one of the more directly actionable platforms to check specifically, since a citation gap here often points to a concrete, fixable content or authority issue rather than something more vague or abstract.
Building a genuinely realistic query list from scratch
Write down, on paper if that helps, the specific, realistic questions a genuine potential customer would actually type into a search box or ask out loud, not questions built around a business's own name or branded terms specifically. "Best SEO agency for a small business in Spain" reveals far more useful information than "Connectia reviews" ever could, since the first reflects how someone actually searches before they even know a specific business exists to consider at all.
Running the check and reading the sources, not just the answer
Perplexity typically shows numbered source citations alongside its answer, which is precisely what makes it more directly diagnostic to work with than platforms that summarise an answer without ever showing their working. Checking not just whether a business appears in the generated text, but which specific sources it actually pulled from, reveals which pages or mentions are currently doing the real work of building visibility, and which competitors' pages are winning that particular citation instead of them, quietly, month after month.
What a citation gap actually reveals
If a competitor is cited and a business simply isn't, checking exactly what source got cited is the fastest diagnostic available: their own website, a review site, a press mention, an industry directory. That source type usually points directly and clearly to which specific gap, content depth, external mentions, structured data, is worth closing first, turning a vague and frustrating sense of being invisible into a specific, genuinely actionable finding worth acting on.
Tracking this over time, not just once
A single check gives a snapshot. Running the exact same query list monthly, logging every result in a simple spreadsheet, reveals whether visibility is genuinely improving as the GEO work progresses, which is the only genuinely reliable way to know if the underlying effort is actually working, given how immature dedicated measurement tools still are for this specific platform right now.
What to do with a consistent gap
A gap that persists stubbornly across several months of checking, despite genuine content and authority improvements, is worth investigating a good deal more specifically: is the content actually being crawled and indexed properly, does the business have the structured data and entity clarity discussed elsewhere in GEO strategy, and is there a genuine third-party source gap that content alone can't close without press or industry mentions specifically.
Making this a habit rather than a one-time check
A single check is useful, but the real value comes from comparing results month over month, since a single snapshot can't distinguish genuine progress from normal variation in how a model responds to the same query on different days. A simple spreadsheet tracking the same queries over time turns this from an interesting one-off exercise into an actual measurement system worth trusting.