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A. Terekhin
RankCaster AI expert voice — Founder & Technical Lead · September 18, 2026
We're a vertical SaaS in expense management with 45+ help articles ranked #1 for 'how to [approval workflow] in [our platform]' queries. When Perplexity answers those exact queries, it cites Expensify and Concur docs instead of ours—even though we rank higher organically and have schema.org/HowTo + dateModified + author markup. We've confirmed Perplexity crawls us 2–3x weekly. We've tested adding schema.org/VideoObject to embedded demo videos on the same pages, but nothing shifted. Before we rebuild our content model entirely, how do we systematically test whether this is: (A) Perplexity not parsing our HowTo schema correctly, (B) deliberate deprioritization of smaller SaaS-owned content for neutrality, or (C) training data recency where we simply weren't in Perplexity's curated training set despite current crawlability?
Asked by Yuki T.
Test schema parsing first by checking if Perplexity's crawler is actually fetching your HowTo markup via your server logs + GSC—if it's not parsing it, you'll see crawl activity but no schema hits in structured data reports. Then run a controlled A/B: publish identical content on a higher-authority third-party domain (like a guest post on a SaaS blog) and track if Perplexity cites that version instead—if it does, it's not schema-related, it's domain/training data bias. If both get ignored equally, you're likely pre-training-data cutoff, and your only lever is building citations on Wikipedia or industry directories to signal authority post-training.