What's documented: Perplexity's citation-first design
Perplexity positions itself around a specific product idea: every substantive claim in an answer should be sourced, with visible, clickable citations rather than an unattributed synthesized paragraph. This is a documented, core part of how the product is designed and marketed. That's the confirmed part — it doesn't disclose the internal retrieval and ranking process that decides which specific pages get pulled into a given answer's citation list.
What this means practically
Given that citation-first design, a hotel's odds of appearing in a Perplexity answer come down to a fairly concrete question: is your page one of the ones Perplexity actually retrieves and cites for a relevant query? This is more binary and checkable than "does Perplexity think favorably of my hotel," because the product is built to show its sources. It's a reasoned inference that being retrievable and clearly structured matters more here than trying to influence some hidden preference score.
PerplexityBot and crawlability
Perplexity operates its own crawlers, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, and respects robots.txt rules the same way every AI crawler covered in this hub does. If your site blocks PerplexityBot, it functionally cannot be retrieved or cited, regardless of how relevant or well-written your content is.
Why comparison-style queries are especially common here
It's commonly observed, and a reasonable inference from Perplexity's product design, that comparison-style queries — "best boutique hotel in Lisbon vs. Porto" — are an especially natural fit for how people use it. This isn't something Perplexity has published as a defined use case, but it's a strong enough pattern to design content around: pages that clearly state comparable facts may be easier to retrieve and cite in exactly this kind of answer.
Test it yourself, and where to go from here
Ask Perplexity a comparison-style question for your city and segment, and read the full answer, not just the summary line. Check which URLs are actually cited: is your hotel's own site one of them, or is the list entirely OTAs and review sites? Perplexity's citation-first design makes it one of the more directly testable engines here — you don't have to guess whether you're being used as a source, because the product shows you its sources.