Perplexity · search
PerplexityBot: user agent and how to block it
Everything on this page is taken from Perplexity's own documentation, quoted and linked, and was checked on 4 October 2026. Where the documentation is silent the page says so instead of filling the gap.
What it is
Operator: Perplexity. Kind, as listed here: search.
“PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Source: Perplexity crawlers. The robots.txt token to match is PerplexityBot.
Does it obey robots.txt?
“Webmasters can use the following robots.txt tags to manage how their sites and content interact with Perplexity.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
Does it affect search?
“PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
What else Perplexity says
“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.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
robots.txt snippets
Two snippets that show the syntax for this token. They are examples, not advice: whether to allow or refuse PerplexityBot is your decision, and the effects above are the vendor's description of them.
Allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Disallow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
How to verify requests
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses for PerplexityBot as a JSON file.
https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json
Source: Perplexity crawlers.
What we measure
PerplexityBot is one of the four agents the Cite Files scanner requests with when it scans a site. Run the AI crawler checker on your own address to see how your site answers it, or read the open record of how scanned sites treat it.
Questions
What is PerplexityBot?
Perplexity describes PerplexityBot like this: “PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.”
Does PerplexityBot obey robots.txt?
The Perplexity documentation says: “Webmasters can use the following robots.txt tags to manage how their sites and content interact with Perplexity.”
How do I block PerplexityBot in robots.txt?
Add a group to robots.txt with the line “User-agent: PerplexityBot” followed by “Disallow: /”. That is an example of the syntax, not a recommendation. On search, Perplexity says: “PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity.”
Also see the robots.txt tester for AI crawlers and the other entries in the AI crawler reference.
Last reviewed . Maintained by Cite Files — corrections to [email protected].