AI search · Perplexity

PerplexityBot

Indexes pages so Perplexity can cite them in answers. Perplexity says it is not used for training.

Operator: Perplexity
Purpose: AI answers. Crawlers that build the indexes AI assistants answer from and cite. Blocking one keeps you out of its answers.
robots.txt token: PerplexityBot
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Documentation: docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots

Block PerplexityBot

Add a group naming it to /robots.txt. Compliant crawlers stop before requesting any page. A firewall rule on the user agent is the only way to enforce it against crawlers that ignore robots.txt.

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

Allow PerplexityBot when everything else is blocked

A group naming the bot wins over User-agent: *, so an explicit allow lets it in while your catch-all rules stay in place.

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Does PerplexityBot reach your site?

The checker applies your robots.txt the way PerplexityBot does, then requests your page with the user agent above, alongside 29 other bots.

Also run by Perplexity: Perplexity-User.

Other ai search: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, DuckAssistBot, Amazonbot, YouBot.

Build a complete file with the robots.txt generator.