PerplexityBot
The crawler behind Perplexity's answers. Blocking it means your site is not surfaced or linked in Perplexity results.
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| What it does | Search & citations |
| Obeys robots.txt | Generally — with caveats |
| Governs | Perplexity |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
Perplexity states that it does not use crawled content for foundation-model training, so this token is about visibility rather than about training data.
Its compliance history is contested and we will not paper over it. Cloudflare documented undeclared stealth crawling in August 2025 and delisted Perplexity from its verified-bots list. We report what your robots.txt declares as intent, not as a guarantee of behaviour — which is the honest reading for any crawler, and a necessary one here.
The robots.txt rules
To block PerplexityBot:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /If neither rule is present, PerplexityBot is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn PerplexityBot away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- Perplexity’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from Perplexity
Other Perplexity tokens
- Perplexity-User — Fetches when a user asks