PerplexityBot

Perplexity · Search-index crawler

PerplexityBot is Perplexity’s search-index crawler — it crawls proactively to build the search index the assistant cites in answers. Allowing it is how your pages become citable.

User-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

Source: vendor-documented at docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots.

Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?

Controllable via robots.txt — Perplexity: “To ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site’s robots.txt file.”

Allow or block PerplexityBot

# Allow (recommended if you want PerplexityBot traffic)
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

# Block
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

Verifying it’s really PerplexityBot

Perplexity documents its crawler and publishes IP information via its bot pages. User-agent strings can be spoofed by anyone — identity claims are only trustworthy when the source IP matches the operator’s published ranges.

What site owners should know

Perplexity states PerplexityBot indexes for search and is “not used to crawl content for AI foundation models” — there is no separate Perplexity training crawler to manage.

Scan your site to see how your robots.txt, content negotiation, and discovery files treat AI agents — including whether you’re blocking agents you meant to allow. Background: the robots.txt guide and agent readiness.

All AI agent user-agents

ClaudeBot · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot · GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · PerplexityBot · Perplexity-User · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · Meta-ExternalAgent