PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is the crawler behind the Perplexity AI search engine. Its job is to index your site so it can be shown and linked in answers, not to train models: Perplexity explicitly states it isn't used for training. Perplexity always cites its sources with a link, so appearing in its index can bring you qualified visits. That said, its robots.txt compliance is in question: in August 2025 Cloudflare documented Perplexity using covert crawlers to bypass blocks and removed it from its verified bots list; Perplexity denied it.
- User-agent
PerplexityBotMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)- Does it respect robots.txt?
- Partially
- Official documentation
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block PerplexityBot?
No. Perplexity is one of the AI search engines that sends the most referral traffic, because it cites and links all its sources. Blocking PerplexityBot erases you from those results and hands the spot to your competitors.
Does PerplexityBot train AI models with my content?
No. According to Perplexity's official documentation, PerplexityBot is used to show and link websites in its search results and is not used to train foundation AI models.
How do I know if PerplexityBot visits my site?
Search for "PerplexityBot" in your server logs. Perplexity also publishes its official IP ranges in a JSON file, in case you want to verify the visits are genuine.