What PerplexityBot does
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's index crawler. It crawls the web to build the search index Perplexity draws on when composing answers, and Perplexity documents that its content is used to ground answers with citations, not to train foundation models.
Should I allow PerplexityBot to crawl my site?
Perplexity cites sources prominently in every answer. Allowing PerplexityBot is the prerequisite for being one of those citations; blocking it removes your pages from the index entirely.
How to control PerplexityBot
Target PerplexityBot in your robots.txt with the PerplexityBot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Block PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Perplexity publishes PerplexityBot's IP ranges for verification.
User-agent string
As published by Perplexity. Remember that user-agent strings can be spoofed, so verify suspicious traffic against the operator's published IP ranges.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)PerplexityBot FAQ
What is PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler, designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. Per its documentation, it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
How do I block PerplexityBot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: PerplexityBot" and "Disallow: /". Perplexity says it may take up to 24 hours for robots.txt changes to be reflected, and it publishes the bot's IP ranges at perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json for verification. Note that Perplexity-User, its separate user-triggered fetcher, generally ignores robots.txt.
About AI Search Crawlers
Crawlers that build the retrieval indexes behind AI search products like ChatGPT search and Perplexity. They decide which pages can be cited as sources.
Blocking these keeps your content out of the source index: AI search products can't cite pages they can't crawl.
