PerplexityBot: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What PerplexityBot is
PerplexityBot builds the retrieval index that Perplexity answers from. This is the category that decides whether you can be cited right now: when someone asks a question and the assistant goes looking for sources, it searches an index this crawler built. Blocking it removes you from those answers.
Operator: Perplexity
robots.txt token: PerplexityBot
User-agent on the wire: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot
Category: Live retrieval / search index
What blocking it actually costs
You stop appearing as a cited source in Perplexity answers.
How to block PerplexityBot
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
robots.txt is not the only thing that can block it
A permissive robots.txt does not mean PerplexityBot can reach you. WAF rules, Cloudflare's bot-management settings, rate limits and country blocks all sit in front of robots.txt and answer first. A site whose robots.txt welcomes PerplexityBot and whose edge returns 403 to it is blocked in every way that matters — and nothing in robots.txt will tell you so.
This is the gap the AI Crawler Access Checker was built to close: it reads robots.txt and sends a real request carrying the crawler's user-agent, so you see what the crawler sees.
Official documentation
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot at https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots.
Common questions
- What user-agent does PerplexityBot send?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot- How do I block PerplexityBot?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /The group must name
PerplexityBoton its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one — under RFC 9309 the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking PerplexityBot cost me?
You stop appearing as a cited source in Perplexity answers.
- How do I verify a request really came from PerplexityBot?
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges it crawls from at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json. A user-agent string is trivially spoofed, so anything acting on PerplexityBot traffic — rate limits, firewall rules, analytics segments — should check the address against that list rather than trusting the header.
Is PerplexityBot blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it — a firewall rule can block PerplexityBot while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free