Perplexity: Stop AI from Recommending Discontinued Products
AI Recommends Discontinued Products on Perplexity? Here's why it happens, the fix, and how to prevent it.
Perplexity Context
Ensure your website appears in Perplexity's AI-powered search results with direct citations and source links.
Allow PerplexityBot in your robots.txt for indexing
Create content that directly answers specific questions
Include statistics, data points, and quotable information
Why This Problem Matters
Perplexity are recommending products or services you no longer offer, frustrating potential customers. Learn how to clean up your AI presence.
Why This Happens in Perplexity
If a retired product's page still exists and still reads like a live offer, Perplexity has no signal that it's gone. It answers from Perplexity's own index, built by PerplexityBot, with linked citations in its answers, where the old page may still be the clearest match.
Signs You Have This Problem in Perplexity
Perplexity recommends a product you've retired
Perplexity recommends products you've sunset or discontinued
Users ask about features from deprecated versions
Old product names appear in AI recommendations
Perplexity doesn't know about your latest product lineup
How to Fix This in Perplexity
Follow these Perplexity-specific solutions:
Mark discontinued products clearly and point to the replacement
Redirect retired product pages to their successor where one exists
Redirect discontinued product pages to current alternatives
Create 'product sunset' announcements with migration paths
Update all references to discontinued products
Add 'discontinued' notices and alternatives to old pages
Build authority for current products with fresh content
Perplexity Technical Details
PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity's answers and is not used to train foundation models; Perplexity-User fetches pages on a user's request and generally ignores robots.txt.
PerplexityBot
Search / answers
Surfaces and links sites in Perplexity answers; not used for foundation-model training.
Perplexity-User
User-requested fetch
Fetches a page when a user asks; generally ignores robots.txt.
robots.txt rule to stay eligible for Perplexity answers:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Source: docs.perplexity.ai
Prevent This Problem in Perplexity
Create a product lifecycle content strategy
Plan content updates when discontinuing products
Maintain redirects for all deprecated URLs
Test AI knowledge after product changes
Helpful Resources
Perplexity Guide
Complete Perplexity optimization guide
How-To Guides
Checklists
Need Help Fixing Perplexity Issues?
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Get Your AI Visibility AuditFrequently Asked Questions
Why is this happening in Perplexity?
If a retired product's page still exists and still reads like a live offer, Perplexity has no signal that it's gone. It answers from Perplexity's own index, built by PerplexityBot, with linked citations in its answers, where the old page may still be the clearest match.
What is the first fix to prioritize in Perplexity?
Mark discontinued products clearly and point to the replacement