How to research a blog topic with Perplexity

You research a blog topic with Perplexity by asking it the question your reader would type, opening the sources behind its answer, checking each claim at the place it first appeared, and then writing down the angle your post will take. The research ends in a brief, which is a short plan for the post that says who it's for, what it argues, what it covers, and which sources back it up.

Perplexity is well suited to the first part of that job. It searches the web for each question and writes an answer with numbered citations, so you can see where every statement came from. Below each answer it suggests related questions, which are often the follow-ups your reader will have. You can choose which sources it searches, such as the general web, academic papers, or social discussions. For a bigger topic, its Research mode runs many searches in a row and writes a longer report with its sources listed. Projects let you keep every thread for one post together, along with files and standing instructions, such as "write for marketing leads at small software companies."

Perplexity stops short of the rest of the job, though. It summarizes what the web already says, so its answer is a picture of the consensus, not your angle. It doesn't know how many people search for the topic, which pages rank for it on Google, or what your blog has already published. It also cites whatever pages it found, and those are sometimes a second-hand blog post quoting a study rather than the study itself, or a figure that has since been updated. Every source still needs a person to open it and check it.

That checking and deciding is the real work. A good result is a brief built on sources you've confirmed, with an angle that adds something the current answers don't, aimed at a question people actually ask. Kite does that work for you, using Perplexity for the searching and its own research for the rest.

Start by telling Kite which topic you want researched. You can name the topic yourself:

"Research a post on how small agencies should price retainers, and write me a brief."

Or you can ask Kite to pick the topic first:

"Choose our next blog post and research it with Perplexity."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. By the time you ask, it already knows your positioning, your customers, your competitors, and the posts on your blog from that research. That means it can propose who the post is for and the question it should answer before it searches anything. Confirm those or adjust them, and Kite starts.

To have Kite search with Perplexity, connect your Perplexity account by adding an API key from Perplexity's API settings. Kite's searches then run through your account and use your Perplexity API credits, which are billed separately from a Perplexity Pro subscription. Kite can also research the topic without your key. Its built-in sources let it see how Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude answer a question, search the web with citations through Exa, and read search demand and ranking pages through DataForSEO.

Research and briefs are internal work, so Kite does them and then shows you the result. Nothing is published until you approve a finished post.

Kite turns the topic into the questions your reader would actually ask, because a post built around a real question is easier to research and easier for search engines and answer engines to match. "Retainer pricing" is a topic, while "How much should a five-person agency charge for a monthly retainer?" is a question someone types.

Kite writes the main question and a handful of related ones from what it knows about your customers and the problems your product solves. It then checks them against search data from DataForSEO, which shows how many people search for each phrasing, how hard it would be to rank, and which pages rank today. If a phrasing has no demand, Kite tells you and suggests one that does.

Kite asks Perplexity each question and records the answer, the sources it cites, and the related questions it suggests. Through your API connection, Kite can limit a search to recent pages, to particular sites, or away from particular sites. For example, it can look only at the last twelve months, or set aside your competitors' blogs to see what independent sources say. For a broad topic, it runs Perplexity's longer research requests, which search many times before writing.

Kite also uses Perplexity's raw search results, which list the pages Perplexity ranks for a query without writing an answer on top. Those show which pages Perplexity considers most relevant, even when its written answer cites only a few of them.

Kite then compares Perplexity's answer with how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude answer the same question. Where the four agree, you're looking at the consensus your post has to cover. Where they disagree, or where they all cite the same two pages, you're looking at an opening. If your company already appears in these answers, Kite notes that too, because the post can strengthen what the answers already say about you.

Kite opens every page Perplexity cited and checks each fact against the page itself before anything goes into the brief. It confirms that the page says what the answer claimed, records who published it and when, and copies the exact figure or sentence that supports the fact.

When a page quotes a number from somewhere else, Kite follows the trail to the original study, survey, or report and cites that instead. It drops sources that are out of date, sources that only repeat another blog, and pages that no longer load. When a fact can't be confirmed, Kite leaves it out of the brief or marks it as unconfirmed, so you know which claims are solid and which are Kite's own inference.

This step matters more than any other, because a post is only as trustworthy as its weakest citation. It also gives the finished post something solid for answer engines to cite, because every fact in it points to the place it came from.

Kite chooses the angle by comparing what the answers and ranking pages already cover with what your company knows that they don't. Sometimes the gap is a missing question that readers keep asking and nobody answers well. Sometimes it's a claim the consensus gets wrong, or a step every guide skips. Often it's first-hand knowledge only your company has, such as what your customers told you, what your product data shows, or how your team actually does the work.

Kite draws on your knowledge base for that last kind of angle, including your positioning, customer research, and the findings from earlier work. It also checks your published posts so the new one doesn't repeat an old one, and it notes which of them the new post should link to.

Kite writes the brief once the sources are checked and the angle is set. It contains:

• The reader the post is for and what they want to come away with
• The main question and the related questions the post answers
• The angle, with a sentence on why it's different from what already ranks and what answer engines already say
• An outline, with the point each section makes
• The facts the post relies on, each with its source, publisher, date, and link
• The search phrase the post targets, with its search volume and difficulty
• Your existing posts the new one should link to

Kite keeps the brief short enough to read in a few minutes. A writer, or Kite itself, should be able to draft the whole post from it without redoing the research.

When the research is done, Kite posts the brief in the conversation where you asked. Alongside it, Kite says which sources it dropped and why, which facts it couldn't confirm, and how Perplexity's answer compared with the other answer engines. It also saves the useful findings to your knowledge base, so the next post on a related topic starts from them.

From there, you can reply with changes to the angle or the outline, or tell Kite to write the post. Kite drafts it in your company's voice from the brief, and once you approve the draft, it publishes it to the site Kite hosts for you or to your connected content system. If you publish on a schedule, Kite can research and brief each post on your calendar the same way, so a checked brief is waiting before each one is due.

When Kite finishes, you have a brief that's ready to write from and a record of the research behind it.