PerplexityBot
Perplexity · Search index crawler
What it does
PerplexityBot builds the index that answers are retrieved from. Builds the Perplexity index. Blocking it removes you from Perplexity citations.
It does not execute JavaScript. Whatever your server returns in the initial HTML response is the entire page as far as PerplexityBot is concerned — if your content is rendered client-side, this crawler reads an empty container.
Should you block PerplexityBot?
Blocking it removes you from the index that answers are drawn from. Your pages stop being available as a source, and you will simply not be cited.
You lose Perplexity citations entirely. Perplexity surfaces sources prominently next to its answers, so being in that index is unusually visible compared with other answer engines — and being absent is unusually invisible.
To allow it
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /To block it
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Put the rule in your robots.txt at the site root. A group that names PerplexityBot explicitly takes precedence over your User-agent: * group, so naming it is how you make your intent survive later edits to the wildcard rules.
Verifying a real PerplexityBot request
Perplexity publishes IP ranges for its crawler. Verification matters more here than most: Perplexity's crawling practices have been publicly disputed, so if you care about the distinction between declared and undeclared fetching, checking source IPs is the only way to know which you are seeing.
The mistake people make
Blocking it in response to reporting about undeclared crawling. Blocking the declared crawler removes you from citations while doing nothing about undeclared traffic, which by definition does not announce itself in your robots.txt.
Perplexity's other crawlers
- Perplexity-UserFetches a page when a Perplexity user opens or asks about a specific link.
Can PerplexityBot reach your site?
The free scan parses your robots.txt, evaluates every AI crawler against it, and tells you how much of a page PerplexityBot would actually come away with.
Run the free scan