What it does
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Surfaces/links sites in Perplexity search results; docs state it is not used for foundation-model training. Full UA: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
How to verify a hit is really PerplexityBot
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json (fetched live 2026-07-19; perplexity.ai path serves same file)
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Confirm the source IP belongs to Perplexity — published IP-range JSON where available, otherwise RDAP/rDNS on the IP. Full method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token PerplexityBot in robots.txt:
# Block PerplexityBot site-wide
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide.
Vendor documentation: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
Frequently asked questions
What is PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's ai search crawler. An AI search index that can cite and link your pages in answers (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search, Alexa, Siri). Blocking removes you from those answer surfaces — for most sites these are wanted crawlers.
Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?
Perplexity claims PerplexityBot respects robots.txt, but compliance is not independently confirmed.
How do I block PerplexityBot?
Add 'User-agent: PerplexityBot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.