What is PerplexityBot?
It crawls pages to surface and link websites in Perplexity search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Indexes pages so an AI search product can cite and link them in answers. Blocking it usually means you stop showing up as a source there.
Perplexity says robots.txt changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.
PerplexityBot user agent
Perplexity documents this user agent for PerplexityBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)Should you block PerplexityBot?
Usually allow it. It is how an AI search product finds pages to cite and link, so blocking it trades away being a source in those answers.
How to block PerplexityBot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really PerplexityBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges PerplexityBot crawls from. A request that claims to be PerplexityBot from any other address is not PerplexityBot.
See when PerplexityBot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Perplexity’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.