Perplexity announced a multi-year partnership with Crusoe Energy to power its entire AI infrastructure, from model training to production serving, as the answer engine continues scaling to answer 1.5 billion questions monthly. The deal underscores a critical shift in how brands must now think about visibility: with consumers increasingly turning to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to research products, traditional search optimization is no longer enough.

Why Every AI Engine Reads the Internet Differently?

One of the most surprising discoveries for marketers is that there is no universal playbook for getting cited by AI answer engines. Each large language model (LLM), a type of AI trained on vast amounts of text data, scans and weighs information differently. When Reddit blocked crawler access in August 2026, ChatGPT citations from Reddit dropped 86 percent, while Perplexity citations nearly doubled in the same period. Claude, another major LLM, barely noticed the change because it rarely cited Reddit in the first place.

This fragmentation means brands must develop individualized strategies for each engine. "As AI becomes a primary interface for search and discovery, marketing is being rebuilt around a new set of workflows," explained Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, speaking about the broader shift in how companies approach visibility in the age of answer engines.

How to Build an Answer Engine Optimization Strategy for Your Brand

• Create Clear, Structured Content: Use a question-and-answer format with informational language that avoids marketing jargon. Refresh content regularly and avoid vague statements that could get penalized by AI systems.
• Establish Authority Through Original Data: Become a primary source by publishing original research, data, and cited claims. This signals to AI engines that your content is authoritative and worth citing.
• Maintain Consistency Across All Channels: Ensure your messaging, style, and positioning remain consistent across your website, media mentions, analyst reports, and industry coverage so AI systems recognize your brand voice.
• Optimize for Each Engine Individually: ChatGPT weights major publications like the New York Times and MIT Technology Review heavily. Gemini relies more on YouTube than other engines. Grok boosts trending content on X (formerly Twitter). Tailor your outreach accordingly.
• Use Structured Markup and Ensure Crawlability: Implement schema markup and make sure your website is easily crawlable by AI systems, similar to traditional SEO best practices.

The infrastructure partnership between Perplexity and Crusoe reveals how much computational power answer engines now require. Perplexity will run its full model lifecycle on Crusoe Cloud, including training frontier models on dedicated NVIDIA GB300 NVL72-powered clusters and serving them in production through Crusoe's Managed Inference service. For Perplexity, every millisecond of latency matters because millions of users experience delays in real time.

"Running AI at Perplexity's scale means every millisecond of latency is felt by users. Crusoe is built around exactly that constraint. It's high-throughput, low-latency inference backed by next-generation hardware," said Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity.

Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO, Perplexity

What This Means for Marketing Teams Right Now?

The rise of answer engines has created what marketing platform Profound calls "the agentic web." As buyers turn to AI to research products and compare brands, marketers must now cover thousands of product pages, documentation, review sites, earned media, social channels, and industry coverage. A single brand's reputation can be shaped by hundreds of thousands of sources that answer engines consult when forming opinions.

Profound, which raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation, is building AI tools specifically designed to help marketing teams navigate this new landscape. The platform now serves over 1,000 enterprise brands, including one-third of the Fortune 100, with customers like Comcast, Walmart, Zoom, and MongoDB.

"Our customers have shown us how much more marketing teams can take on when they have purpose built AI to help them do the work. Today, they're using our Agents to research, write, and report," said James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO of Profound.

James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO, Profound

The key insight is that success in answer engine optimization requires continuous monitoring and adaptation. What works for ChatGPT may not work for Grok. What worked last month may not work this month as these systems evolve. Brands that treat answer engine optimization as a static checklist will fall behind those treating it as an ongoing research and testing process.

Crusoe's partnership with Perplexity also signals that infrastructure providers are racing to support the computational demands of answer engines. Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe, noted that "the fastest-moving AI companies need infrastructure that keeps pace across the entire model lifecycle and scales with them as they grow." This arms race for computing power and efficiency will likely shape which answer engines can scale fastest and serve users most reliably.