What is PerplexityBot?
Crawls sites to surface and link them in Perplexity search results; Perplexity says it does not crawl content for AI foundation models.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Purpose
- AI search index
- Feeds
- Perplexity search results
- robots.txt token
PerplexityBot- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- IP ranges
- Published list
- Source
- Perplexity documentation
PerplexityBot user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Published as the full user-agent string.
Match it in robots.txt with the token PerplexityBot. User agents can be faked, so check requests against Perplexity's published IP ranges before trusting them. Perplexity recommends matching both the user-agent string and the source IP against its published JSON list (updated regularly).
Should you block PerplexityBot?
Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot to make sure your site appears in its search results, so blocking it can keep you out of them; changes can take up to 24 hours.
Yes. Perplexity says PerplexityBot follows robots.txt. “Webmasters can use the following robots.txt tags to manage how their sites and content interact with Perplexity.”
Block PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Other Perplexity crawlers
Perplexity uses separate user agents for separate jobs, so you can allow one and block another.
- Perplexity-User (User-triggered fetch): Visits a page when a Perplexity user's question needs it and may link that page in the answer; it is not used for web crawling or to train AI foundation models.
PerplexityBot FAQ
What is PerplexityBot?
Crawls sites to surface and link them in Perplexity search results; Perplexity says it does not crawl content for AI foundation models.
What is the PerplexityBot user agent?
PerplexityBot identifies itself as: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot). In robots.txt, match it with the token "PerplexityBot".
Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?
Yes. Perplexity says PerplexityBot follows robots.txt.
How do I block PerplexityBot?
Add "User-agent: PerplexityBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot to make sure your site appears in its search results, so blocking it can keep you out of them; changes can take up to 24 hours.
Crawlable isn't the same as cited
Letting AI crawlers in is step one. Citedify checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews actually recommend your brand, and what to fix when they don't.
Facts on this page come from Perplexity's documentation, checked 2026-09-28. Sources: docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers