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Search Crawler

PerplexityBot

Operated by Perplexity · Powers Perplexity search

✓ GEO Recommendation: Keep Open

PerplexityBot crawls publicly available web pages to build the index behind Perplexity's search results. Perplexity respects robots.txt directives, and states that it does not use this crawl to train its underlying AI models.

Owner
Perplexity
Trigger
Automated crawl
Used for AI Training
No
robots.txt control
Yes
Impact if blocked
Can significantly limit your site's content coverage and visibility in Perplexity search
How to identify
User-Agent: PerplexityBot

What it does

PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results. It crawls publicly accessible pages to build and refresh the index that Perplexity's answer engine draws from.

Perplexity states that PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models — that distinction belongs to how the company separates search indexing from model training, similar in spirit to how OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot from GPTBot.

Why we recommend keeping it open

  • Blocking it can significantly limit your site's content coverage and visibility in Perplexity search
  • Not used to train Perplexity's foundation models, per Perplexity's documentation
  • Follows robots.txt directives, so access stays fully under your control

Identification & robots.txt

User-Agent identifier
PerplexityBot
Verification

Additional verification information is available in Perplexity's official documentation.

Robots.txt guidance — Allow rule
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /