PerplexityBot
What PerplexityBot means
PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to index pages for its search results. Perplexity states that it "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity" and that "it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models."
More precisely
The robots.txt token is `PerplexityBot` and the published user-agent string is `Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)`. IP ranges are published as JSON at perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json. A second agent, `Perplexity-User`, handles fetches triggered by a person, and Perplexity says that one "generally ignores robots.txt rules" because a user requested it.
Why it matters
Disallowing this token removes a site from Perplexity's answers without gaining any training protection, because Perplexity documents no training crawler at all. Perplexity also notes that each of its settings works independently and changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect.
Example
Perplexity recommends allowing `PerplexityBot` in robots.txt and permitting its published IP ranges if you want your pages to be eligible for its results.
Where this came from
Definitions here follow the specification or documentation that defines the term, not a paraphrase of another glossary.
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Perplexity Crawlers — Perplexity
PerplexityBot is a search crawler and is not used for foundation model training, its user-agent string and IP endpoint, the separate Perplexity-User agent that generally ignores robots.txt, and the independence and 24 hour propagation statements.
Primary source · read 2026-09-03