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PerplexityBot: Perplexity's search crawler
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's search crawler. Perplexity documents it as surfacing and linking websites in Perplexity's results and states it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Blocking it removes you from the index Perplexity cites from and protects nothing. It respects robots.txt. Verify visits against Perplexity's published perplexitybot.json address file.
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621PerplexityBot requests to attensira.com
to 331 pages · Perplexity #4 of 7 operators
| Operator | Share of requests | Requests |
|---|---|---|
| Meta | 131,105 | |
| OpenAI | 7,536 | |
| ByteDance | 3,505 | |
| Perplexity (this page) | 621 | |
| Microsoft | 541 | |
| Google Search | 189 | |
| Anthropic | 104 |
User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP · · n=143,601 requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block PerplexityBot in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves PerplexityBot today.
# Allow Perplexity's search crawler, the citation path,# but keep it out of areas that should never be quoted# back.User-agent: PerplexityBotAllow: /Disallow: /account/User-agent: PerplexityBotAllow: /Disallow: /api/We name PerplexityBot and allow it everywhere except /api/, the same as every AI and search crawler we allow by name.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs PerplexityBot, and what is it for?
Perplexity runs it, and we file it under search indexing. Surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results. Perplexity states it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
From Perplexity’s documentation, read . Why a training fetch and a search fetch are different decisions: the AI crawler guide.
Why does a new PerplexityBot rule seem not to work?
Two details from Perplexity's own page explain most surprises. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be reflected,6so logs checked an hour after an edit show stale behaviour, not a broken rule. And each user-agent setting works independently: a PerplexityBot rule says nothing about Perplexity-User, a separate token that generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the fetch.5 If requests keep arriving after a block, check which token sent them. The head-to-head is in PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User, and the full set of blocks is in the robots.txt chapter.
How much does PerplexityBot fetch from attensira.com?
From the same read as the traffic frame at the top of this page (Attensira's AI traffic board for attensira.com, 30 days to 4 October 2026, n=143,601 AI crawler requests): 621 requests filed as PerplexityBot across 331 pages, all classified as search indexing. That is a wide, shallow crawl: fewer than two requests per page. The counts are claimed traffic, not checked against perplexitybot.json, and a crawl is not a citation. Whether Perplexity then names you is the number that matters, and it is measured separately.
How do I verify that a visit really came from PerplexityBot?
Check the source address against www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json, which Perplexity asks site owners to permit.4 A request carrying the token from an address outside that file is not PerplexityBot, whatever the header says. Perplexity publishes a separate file per agent, so a verified address also tells you which agent called. Count PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User in separate filters, hyphen included, since they follow different robots.txt rules. The procedure, including the reverse-DNS method other operators use instead, is in verifying a crawler.
- IP range file
- perplexitybot.json
Perplexity publishes no reverse-DNS suffix for PerplexityBot; verify by the range file.
ResearcherTranscribed from Perplexity documentation · How often do sites block PerplexityBot?
Measured by us, not reported by Perplexity: the robots.txt of the 10,000 highest-ranked domains on the Tranco list for 2026-09-01. A domain that never mentions the token wrote no policy for it.
The method and every row, with the CSV.
- disallow PerplexityBot at the root
- 8.2%
- 655 of 8,036 domains
- allow it by name
- 3.9%
- 313 domains
- never mention it
- 87.9%
- 7,068 domains
What user-agent string does PerplexityBot send?
Match the token, never the version. A rule pinned to a version stops matching silently the next time the operator ships.
The version in this string changes; check Perplexity’s page before relying on the exact text.
What does allowing PerplexityBot cost?
Allowing it costs crawl load and keeps you in the index Perplexity cites from. Perplexity states it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, so blocking it removes you from Perplexity's results and protects nothing.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https:/Should I allow PerplexityBot in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
You blocked every AI user agent you could find and your Perplexity citations disappeared.
Remove PerplexityBot from the blocklist and allow it explicitly.
PerplexityBot is the indexing agent whose documented job is surfacing and linking sites in Perplexity results. Blocking it does not protect you from training — Perplexity states this crawler is not used for foundation-model training — it only removes you from the index that produces the citation.
A firewall rule is dropping PerplexityBot before it reaches your origin, and robots.txt looks correct.
Allowlist the addresses in perplexitybot.json at the WAF, not just in robots.txt.
robots.txt is a request to a crawler that already reached you. A WAF rule refuses the connection first, so a perfectly permissive robots.txt file changes nothing. Perplexity's documentation asks for both — allow the token, and permit its published ranges.
Your logs show heavy PerplexityBot traffic and you want to know whether it is genuine before rate-limiting it.
Match the source addresses against perplexitybot.json before touching anything.
The token is free text in a header. If the addresses are not in Perplexity's published file, you are looking at something wearing Perplexity's name, and a robots.txt rule would have had no effect on it. Rate-limiting the real crawler instead costs you index coverage.
What else do people ask?
What is PerplexityBot?
Does blocking PerplexityBot stop Perplexity from reading my site?
Does PerplexityBot use my content for training?
Where do these facts come from?
6 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity, and states it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.”
Perplexity publishes PerplexityBot's full user-agent string as "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)".
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Perplexity publishes the addresses PerplexityBot fetches from at www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json, and recommends permitting requests from those published ranges.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
Perplexity documents Perplexity-User as a separate token supporting user actions within Perplexity, and states that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”
Perplexity states that it may take up to 24 hours for its systems to reflect changes to a site's robots.txt settings.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
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