Quick answer: PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to surface and link websites in its search results. Perplexity says it respects robots.txt and is not used to crawl content for training foundation models. If you block it, your pages will not be indexed for Perplexity answers, though Perplexity may still show a domain, headline, and brief summary.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Type
- Search crawler
- robots.txt token
PerplexityBot- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- Used for
- Finding and linking websites in Perplexity search results
- User agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)- How to verify
- Compare the source IP with the ranges Perplexity publishes at perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json
What is PerplexityBot?
Perplexity is built around citations, so being crawlable by PerplexityBot matters more here than on most AI products. Answers typically list several numbered sources, and those sources come from pages Perplexity's systems were allowed to index.
It works alongside Perplexity-User, which fetches pages live when a user's question needs them. PerplexityBot builds the index ahead of time; Perplexity-User reads pages on demand.
What happens if you block PerplexityBot?
Blocking PerplexityBot stops Perplexity from indexing your full text for answers. Perplexity says it may still show your domain, a headline, and a short factual summary, but you lose the detailed citations that send clicks. It does not affect Google or Bing.
Should you allow PerplexityBot?
Allow it if you want Perplexity traffic. It is not a training crawler, and Perplexity's audience skews toward research and purchase decisions, which makes its citations unusually valuable for comparison pages, guides, and product documentation.
Check whether PerplexityBot can reach your site
Enter your domain or a specific page. The checker reads your live robots.txt, picks the group PerplexityBot would use, and applies the longest matching rule, the same way major crawlers resolve conflicts.
robots.txt rules for PerplexityBot
Put each group in the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. User agent names are matched without regard to case, and the most specific matching group wins.
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Allow: /The rule most people get wrong: once PerplexityBot has its own group, it ignores everything under User-agent: *. If your wildcard group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines inside the PerplexityBot group too.
Common Perplexity setup: be indexed and cited by Perplexity
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to verify real PerplexityBot traffic
Perplexity publishes PerplexityBot IP ranges at perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json. In 2025 Cloudflare published research alleging that Perplexity also accessed sites through undeclared agents, which Perplexity disputed, so if you rely on blocking, pair robots.txt with firewall rules and review your logs.
To see how often it visits, count requests by user agent in your access log. On a typical Nginx server:
grep -i "PerplexityBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -cPerplexityBot compared with other Perplexity agents
| Agent | Operator | Type | Follows robots.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Search crawler | Yes |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | User-triggered fetcher | Generally no, fetches are user-initiated |
See all 20 agents side by side in the AI crawler directory.
PerplexityBot FAQ
See every AI crawler signal at once
The free AI SEO audit checks robots.txt access for 12 AI crawlers, plus llms.txt, schema, content and metadata, in a few seconds.
Run the free AI SEO audit