PerplexityBot: Perplexity's AI search crawler
Perplexity's crawler for surfacing and linking websites in its search results.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
PerplexityBot at a glance
Everything Perplexity documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Type
- AI search and answers
- Used for
- Perplexity's index for cited answers, not training
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Perplexity documents that PerplexityBot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
- robots.txt token
PerplexityBot- User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
- IP addresses
- www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json
- Documentation
- docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
How to block PerplexityBot
Fetches the pages AI answers cite and link to. Blocking it keeps your pages out of those answers: no citation, no link.
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to PerplexityBot.
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
How to verify PerplexityBot
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "PerplexityBot" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against Perplexity's published list (www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json). A request from outside it is not PerplexityBot, whatever it says.
- 3
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other crawlers from Perplexity
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Perplexity's crawler for surfacing and linking websites in its search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt for a site to appear in Perplexity's answers.
Yes. Perplexity documents that PerplexityBot follows robots.txt, so a rule for its token is honoured.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: PerplexityBot" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses Perplexity publishes at your firewall.
Perplexity's AI answers stop finding your pages through it, so they cannot cite or link to you. If you want to keep your content out of training but stay in answers, block Perplexity's training token instead and leave PerplexityBot allowed.
Checked against Perplexity's documentation on 29 September 2026.
Next: see whether AI recommends you
Letting the right crawlers in is the first step. AskWatch shows what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI answer when buyers ask about your category, and who they name.
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