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// Perplexity crawler

PerplexityBot:what it is and how to block it

Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

robots.txt token
PerplexityBot
Operator
Perplexity
Purpose
AI search and assistant
Follows robots.txt
Says robots.txt controls access
User agent
Published
IP list
Published
// user agent

PerplexityBot user agent

robots.txt token
PerplexityBot
Full user-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

An example from Perplexity, and the version number may change.

Source: Perplexity docs: Perplexity crawlers. Checked October 30, 2026.

// robots.txt

How to block PerplexityBot

Perplexity lists PerplexityBot as a robots.txt token for managing access, and says a change can take up to 24 hours to apply.

Blocking it removes your site from Perplexity citations, which is where its referral traffic comes from.

Perplexity-User fetches a page when a person asks Perplexity something. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, because a user requested the fetch.

Block it from the whole site
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
Allow it everywhere
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Add the group to the robots.txt at the root of each host. A crawler with a group of its own ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any you still want it to follow.

Write rules for all 20 AI crawlers at once
// verify

How to verify a real PerplexityBot visit

Perplexity publishes the crawler's IP ranges as JSON, and recommends matching the user agent and those ranges together, for example in a firewall rule.

Published IP list
https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json
// your site

See whether PerplexityBot visits your site

robots.txt testerCheck whether your rules let PerplexityBot reach any path, and which line decides it.Open the toolAI crawler blockerSee what your live robots.txt allows PerplexityBot and the other 19 AI crawlers on our list today.Open the tool
Server Log MonitoringLists PerplexityBot by name with its hits, its 403s and whether it follows your robots.txt. Hits are checked against Perplexity's published addresses, and fakes land in Fake bots.
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// faq

Questions

Does PerplexityBot train AI models?

Perplexity says no: PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

Will blocking PerplexityBot stop every Perplexity visit?

No. Perplexity-User fetches pages for user questions and, Perplexity says, generally ignores robots.txt rules.

Does blocking PerplexityBot affect my Google rankings?

No. PerplexityBot is not Googlebot, so a rule for it changes nothing about how Google Search crawls, indexes or ranks your pages.

Other AI crawlers

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