AI crawlers · Perplexity

PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot is a crawler operated by Perplexity, and it builds the index an assistant answers from — the fact that decides everything else on this page.

What does PerplexityBot actually do?

PerplexityBot builds the index Perplexity searches before it answers, which makes it the gatekeeper for being citable at all. A page it has never crawled cannot appear as a numbered source no matter how well it answers the question, and no amount of query-time fetching will rescue a URL the index does not contain.

Verification carries more weight here than the field list suggests. There is no signed request and no reverse DNS name to fall back on, so an address check is the only evidence that exists. Perplexity's crawling has also been publicly challenged, with security vendors alleging fetches from undeclared agents against sites that had blocked it - a claim Perplexity rejects. Either way, a rule you cannot audit is a hope.

If you allow it, log it apart from Perplexity-User. The index crawl tells you how much of your site is eligible to be cited; the live fetches tell you how often that eligibility gets used. Those are different questions, and collapsing both into one figure for Perplexity traffic answers neither of them.

Perplexity's documentation makes a claim worth recording because few vendors make it: neither of its crawlers is used to collect content for AI foundation models. If that holds, the usual training-versus-visibility trade does not apply to this vendor at all, and a publisher blocking it to prevent training is giving up citation for nothing. It is also a claim only Perplexity can verify, which is worth saying in the same breath.

CrawlClick files PerplexityBot as a search index crawl. What the three crawl purposes mean.

A robots rule that names Perplexity rather than PerplexityBot also lands on Perplexity-User (query time), which does a different job. Blocking the wrong one of a vendor's agents is the commonest mistake in this whole subject.

Should I block PerplexityBot?

PerplexityBot in the logs gets read as readers arriving through Perplexity, when this agent is building an index and the reader-facing fetches come under a different name.

To block it anyway, add this to robots.txt (how the rules resolve):

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

Replace Disallow: / with Allow: / to permit it explicitly. A crawler that ignores robots.txt is not blocked by it either way — that is what verification and edge rules are for.

How do I verify PerplexityBot is genuine?

Perplexity lets you check a request claiming to be PerplexityBot against published IP ranges. A user-agent header on its own proves nothing.

Its address list lives at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json.

The verification procedure explains why a reverse lookup has to be forward-confirmed, and why a published range list has to be re-fetched rather than pinned.

How do I find PerplexityBot in my logs?

Match the user-agent against "perplexitybot", case-insensitively. Set the PerplexityBot fetch count beside the visits Perplexity actually returns; that ratio is your crawl-to-referral gap for this engine.

Crawl-to-referral gap defines the ratio, and the rate-limiting guide covers what to do when the volume itself is the problem.

Registry last reviewed 2026-09-13.