PerplexityBot

Perplexity's crawler for search indexing: it "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." Perplexity documents a second, user-triggered agent alongside it, and the difference matters for what a Disallow achieves. Source for every quote: Perplexity's crawler documentation, read 13 September 2026.

Token	What Perplexity says it's for	robots.txt
`PerplexityBot`	Search indexing: "to ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site's robots.txt file and permitting requests from our published IP ranges".	Managed by robots.txt; Perplexity says a change "may take up to 24 hours" to be reflected.
`Perplexity-User`	"When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response." "It is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models."	"Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules."

Allow it

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Block it

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

With no dedicated group, PerplexityBot falls back to whatever your default (User-agent: *) group allows, same as any other crawler without its own group.

Consequences either way

Disallowing PerplexityBot is the control Perplexity documents for its search index (it recommends allowing the bot "to ensure your site appears in search results"). It does not stop Perplexity-User: by Perplexity's own account that agent fetches a page when a person's question calls for it and generally ignores robots.txt, so a Disallow for it states a preference rather than enforcing one. Our scanner reads only PerplexityBot from your file and scores it as one of the five retrieval agents (how); it does not score Perplexity-User, because there is no documented policy to evaluate. Neither rule has any bearing on whether your edge (a WAF, a CDN bot-management setting) separately blocks or allows self-identifying crawlers regardless of what your robots.txt says. See how we test for that mismatch with our own crawler, never by sending PerplexityBot's user agent, so a block is strong evidence and a pass is weaker.

Both agents arrive with a full browser-style user agent string containing the token (PerplexityBot/1.0 or Perplexity-User/1.0), and Perplexity publishes the IP ranges for each; its documentation recommends that a WAF allow rule check the user agent and the source address together.

Check your site's current policy →