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PerplexityBot: User Agent, robots.txt and Whether to Block It

PerplexityBot is the crawler that builds Perplexity’s search index. Perplexity cites its sources more prominently than any other answer engine — every answer is a stack of numbered references — so being crawlable here converts to visible citations faster than anywhere else.

User agent

Section titled “User agent”
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

Robots.txt token: PerplexityBot. Perplexity publishes IP ranges for verification.

PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User

Section titled “PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User”
  • PerplexityBot — background indexing for search results. Honours robots.txt.
  • Perplexity-User — fetches a page live when a user’s question triggers it. Because it acts on a direct user request, it may fetch pages robots.txt would otherwise exclude — comparable to a human pasting your URL into a browser.

If you saw “Perplexity ignores robots.txt” headlines: the controversy centred on user-triggered fetching. For AEO purposes the practical playbook is unchanged — allow the indexer, and make the pages it finds worth citing.

Allow or block?

Section titled “Allow or block?”
# Recommended
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Perplexity’s user base skews toward researchers and considered-purchase buyers, and its roundup-heavy sourcing means niche sites get cited quickly once indexed. Blocking it is only defensible for licensed-content publishers.

Perplexity leans heavily on third-party “best X” roundups when recommending businesses — worth as much attention as your own site. See the getting-cited playbook.

Section titled “Related”