PerplexityBot: what it is and how to allow or block it
Perplexity’s crawler for its search results. Not used for training, according to Perplexity.
Last checked 2026-10-08
- Company
- Perplexity
- Used for
- Perplexity search
- Job
- Builds an AI search index
- Follows robots.txt
- Yes
- Name in robots.txt
- PerplexityBot
What PerplexityBot does
PerplexityBot reads pages so Perplexity can show and link to them in its answers. Perplexity says it is not used to collect content for training AI foundation models.
Should you allow it?
Allow it if you want Perplexity to cite you. Since it isn’t a training crawler, there is little reason to block it.
What blocking it changes: Your pages stop being added to Perplexity’s search results.
Allow or block PerplexityBot in robots.txt
Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in its results, and says changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
To allow it
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
To block it
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
robots.txt lets every bot in by default, so you only need the allow lines if another rule in your file would otherwise block it. Our robots.txt guide explains how rules for different bots combine.
How it appears in your server logs
Perplexity publishes this as the bot’s user-agent string, the label it sends with every visit:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
How to check a visit is really PerplexityBot
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses PerplexityBot crawls from.
Our guide to server log checks shows where to find these visits on common hosting setups.
Source: Perplexity crawler documentation, checked 2026-10-08. Bots and their rules change often, so check the company’s own page before making a decision that matters.
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