PerplexityBot: Perplexity's ai search crawler
PerplexityBot belongs to Perplexity. It builds the index an AI assistant searches when it answers questions. Block it and your pages can't be found or cited in that assistant's search results.
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| Used for | Perplexity |
| Type | AI search crawler |
| robots.txt name | PerplexityBot |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) |
| Published IP ranges | https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json |
| Blocked by top sites | 10.9% of 740 (study) |
| Official documentation | docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots |
Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Allow or block PerplexityBot in robots.txt
To block it on the whole site:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (useful when a rule for all bots would block it):
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Perplexity recommends allowing it. Changes can take up to 24 hours.
robots.txt is a request, not a wall. A CDN or firewall rule can turn a bot away even when robots.txt allows it, and nothing in the file will show that.
The free check requests your home page as a browser and as AI bots, reads your robots.txt and shows what gets blocked. No sign-up.
Check my siteIs it really PerplexityBot?
Anyone can send a request with this bot's name. Perplexity publishes the IP ranges its requests come from, so a request that carries the name from another address is an impostor. PageLens checks every request from this bot against that list.
See PerplexityBot on your own site
PerplexityBot doesn't run JavaScript, so analytics scripts never record it. AI Visibility in PageLens reads it from your server or CDN and shows which pages it requested, when, and which requests ended in a 404.