AI crawlers / PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot
Perplexity · Perplexity search · Discovery / citation crawler
Perplexity's search crawler. Allow it to have the best chance of appearing and being cited in Perplexity answers.
At a glance
Affects live AI answersYes
Affects search inclusion,
Used for model trainingNo
robots.txt tokenPerplexityBot
Source confidencedocumented · verified 2026-09-04
Allow it, this crawler decides whether you can be cited in this engine’s answers.
What PerplexityBot is
PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. Perplexity's documentation notes that sites which allow this crawler have the best chance of appearing in Perplexity results.
PerplexityBot does not collect training data for foundation models, Perplexity states its crawlers serve search and user-facing features only.
It is separate from Perplexity-User, the on-demand fetcher used when a person asks Perplexity a question directly.
Controlling PerplexityBot in robots.txt
Add the matching group to the robots.txt at your site root.
Allow PerplexityBot:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Block PerplexityBot:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Check what your live site actually allows with the Robots.txt + AI-Bot Tester.
Source
Verified on 2026-09-04 against Perplexity, Crawlers & user agents. Confidence: documented, stated in the vendor’s own documentation.
The next question
Your page is AI-ready. But does AI actually cite you?
Being crawlable is step one. The AI Visibility Checker shows whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini name and cite your brand, and who they name instead.
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