PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's search crawler. It surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, and Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Blocking it makes your pages less likely to appear and be linked in Perplexity answers.
What it does
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity, and that it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. To appear in Perplexity's search results, Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt.
Because it is not a training crawler, disallowing it to opt out of model training costs search visibility without serving that goal. Perplexity says robots.txt changes may take up to 24 hours to be reflected.
In our 2026-11 study, 16.6% of popular sites with a robots.txt blocked it. →
robots.txt token
PerplexityBot
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)How to allow it
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /How to block it
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /How to verify real visits
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges for PerplexityBot as a JSON file. Match the source IP of the request against those ranges; anyone can send a request that claims to be PerplexityBot, so the user agent alone proves nothing. Perplexity notes the version number in the user agent may change.