Teardown: what Perplexity cites for “best payroll software”

The setup

Perplexity is the most transparent of the answer engines: every claim carries numbered citations. That makes it the best place to study retrieval behavior before scaling a GEO program.

We ran 30 payroll software prompts — pricing, comparison, migration, compliance — and recorded every cited URL, its position and the claim it supported.

The citation concentration problem

Eight sources accounted for roughly 80% of all citations. Four of the top ten citations pointed at the same aggregator, whose rankings then shaped almost every answer.

For a vendor, that means two very different jobs:

• Be correct everywhere so the sources that get retrieved describe you accurately.
• Be present in the eight sources that models actually use — through inclusion, updated listings and earned editorial coverage.

Vendor pages are cited, but rarely first

Only one vendor page was cited more than twice, and it was a pricing page with a clean comparison table — not a home page, not a feature page. Perplexity appears to favor pages that resolve a specific factual question in a structured form.

The practical implication: build pages that behave like reference documents. Tables, definitions, explicit dates, clear scope.

What we recommend for payroll vendors

1. Publish a pricing page with a real comparison table and a visible last-updated date.
2. Get listed accurately in the four dominant aggregators — name, category, pricing tier, integrations.
3. Maintain a compliance FAQ with citations to primary sources.
4. Measure monthly: which eight sources own your category, and are you among them?

A note on honesty

Perplexity’s retrieval set changes with the model version and the query phrasing. Treat any single teardown as a directional signal. The program that wins is the one that samples continuously and acts on the trend.