PerplexityBot
Whether Perplexity can index and cite your pages
What PerplexityBot does
PerplexityBot crawls and indexes pages so that Perplexity can surface and link them in answers. Blocking it removes you from Perplexity's results.
It is the most blocked retrieval crawler in our survey — 33 of 148 readable files disallow it, around 22 percent, against 8 percent for OAI-SearchBot. Perplexity attracted more publisher hostility earlier than the other assistants did, and robots.txt files still carry the result.
Its IP list is the smallest here, eight prefixes, and the least recently updated. Perplexity is unusually direct about the split between its two agents, stating plainly that the user-triggered one behaves differently with respect to robots.txt.
PerplexityBot is not Perplexity-User
PerplexityBot indexes your site for results. Perplexity-User fetches a page because somebody clicked through to it. Perplexity documents different robots.txt behaviour for the two.
What Perplexity-User does insteadHow to block PerplexityBot
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /What that costs you: Perplexity cannot cite you.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
The short token is what robots.txt matches. This is what actually arrives in an access log, copied from Perplexity’s documentation. Version numbers move, so match on the token rather than the whole string.
User-agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)To find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'PerplexityBot' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really PerplexityBot
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. Perplexity publishes the addresses PerplexityBot fetches from: 8 prefixes when we read the file, last changed on 7 February 2025. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
Terminal
curl -s https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json | python3 -c "
import sys, json, ipaddress
addr = ipaddress.ip_address('203.0.113.10') # the address from your logs
nets = json.load(sys.stdin)['prefixes']
print(any(addr in ipaddress.ip_network(n.get('ipv4Prefix') or n['ipv6Prefix']) for n in nets))
"False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
What Perplexity says about it
Allow the IP ranges as well
Perplexity, like OpenAI, recommends both allowing the token in robots.txt and permitting its published IP ranges. Being allowed in one and refused in the other is, from their side, indistinguishable from being blocked.
Read from https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots on 14 September 2026.
Should you block PerplexityBot?
Blocking it removes you from Perplexity's results and buys nothing on the training question, since Perplexity states this crawler is not used to collect content for training foundation models.
More sites block it than any other retrieval crawler we measured, and timing explains most of that. Perplexity had public disputes with publishers earlier than its competitors, and a robots.txt edited then usually still says what it said then.
If you blocked it in that period and have not revisited, it is worth a second look. The decision was made about a different situation.
Questions
- Why do so many sites block PerplexityBot?
- It is the most blocked retrieval crawler we measured. Perplexity drew public disputes with publishers earlier than its competitors, and a robots.txt edited in that period usually still says what it said then.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from Perplexity’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is PerplexityBot allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.