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 2026-08-22); perplexity.ai path serves same file
Strongest available check: the vendor publishes the crawler's egress IPs. Fetch the list, then confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a UA match from any other IP is a spoofer.
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Full step-by-step 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. robots.txt governs whether PerplexityBot may fetch; llms.txt is the separate, curated map AI assistants read once allowed in.
Vendor documentation: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
The Perplexity family
Perplexity operates 2 distinct tokens in this roster, and they do not block each other: a robots.txt line for PerplexityBot does nothing to its siblings — each needs its own User-agent: entry (the robots.txt guide has combined patterns).
| Token | Role | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity-User | User action | ignores robots.txt |
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.
How do I verify PerplexityBot traffic by IP?
Fetch Perplexity's published IP list for PerplexityBot and confirm the hit's source IP falls inside it — a PerplexityBot user-agent from any other IP is a spoofer.
Related bots
Same vendor, then other ai search crawlers — the full directory profiles all 34.