PerplexityBot
Perplexity · AI search · robots.txt: Yes
Crawls the web to surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Block PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Blocking PerplexityBot keeps your site out of Perplexity's search results, since Perplexity recommends allowing it to appear there. Perplexity says PerplexityBot does not collect content for AI foundation models, so there is no training opt-out to gain from blocking it.
Allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block PerplexityBot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Facts
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Purpose
- AI search index
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as a robots.txt token and says changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "PerplexityBot/1.0".
- How to verify it
- Match the request's IP address against Perplexity's published PerplexityBot IP list. For firewalls, Perplexity suggests rules that combine the user-agent with those IP ranges.
Published list: www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json — 8 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 7 Feb 2025. Always match against the live list; operators update them.
What Perplexity says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.”
“To ensure your site appears in search results, we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site’s robots.txt file and permitting requests from our published IP ranges listed below.”
“Webmasters can use the following robots.txt tags to manage how their sites and content interact with Perplexity. Each setting works independently, and it may take up to 24 hours for our systems to reflect changes.”
“Set up a rule that combines both User-Agent and IP address conditions:”
“Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0;”
Sources
- Perplexity: Perplexity Crawlers — fetched and checked 2026-09-22
- Perplexity: PerplexityBot IP ranges (perplexitybot.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-22