PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot is Perplexity's primary crawler. Because Perplexity answers are heavily citation-driven, allowing PerplexityBot is one of the highest-leverage changes most sites can make for AI search visibility.

User agent

User-agent: PerplexityBot

Why PerplexityBot is special

Perplexity surfaces 4–8 citations next to every answer. Unlike training-only crawlers, PerplexityBot fetches content for active retrieval — so your robots.txt directives directly determine whether your URLs can appear as a clickable source.

Related Perplexity crawlers

• PerplexityBot — search index crawler
• Perplexity-User — on-demand fetcher when a user clicks a "read more" link

Should you allow it?

Yes, in almost all cases. Blocking PerplexityBot removes your site from Perplexity's citation pool entirely. The traffic implications are direct: Perplexity-referred clicks are typically high-intent, since the user already saw a synopsis of your page in the answer.

Example directive

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /