PerplexityBot: user agent, purpose, and whether to allow it
PerplexityBot indexes content so Perplexity can cite it in answers. Perplexity does not build foundation models, so this is retrieval rather than training.
Specification
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Search indexBuilds the index an AI product cites from. Blocking it removes you from that product's answers. This is the expensive block, and the one most often made by accident. |
| Agent kind | CrawlerAutonomous crawler. Appears in your logs under its own user-agent. |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) |
| robots.txt token | PerplexityBot |
| robots.txt compliance | Operator claims compliance, disputed by third parties |
| Verification | Published IP range filehttps://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json |
| Sends referral traffic | Yes |
| Attaches a citation | Yes |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | indexing |
| Source | Operator documentationhttps://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots |
| Verified on |
What blocking it costs you
Blocking PerplexityBot removes you from Perplexity citations, which is one of the more reliable AI referral sources. Compliance note: Cloudflare published evidence in August 2025 that Perplexity used undeclared crawlers which bypassed robots.txt. State this as the disputed finding it is, and attribute it.
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address PerplexityBot only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Block PerplexityBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Questions
What is the PerplexityBot user agent?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?
Operator claims compliance, disputed by third parties
What does blocking PerplexityBot cost me?
Blocking PerplexityBot removes you from Perplexity citations, which is one of the more reliable AI referral sources. Compliance note: Cloudflare published evidence in August 2025 that Perplexity used undeclared crawlers which bypassed robots.txt. State this as the disputed finding it is, and attribute it.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
Kymo classifies every crawler hit server-side using this registry, so PerplexityBot shows up under Perplexity with its purpose attached. Read how crawler detection works, or run a free free AI visibility check to see what each crawler currently gets back from your server. No account needed for the check.