PerplexityBot: the crawler behind Perplexity's search results

Operator

Perplexity

robots.txt token

PerplexityBot

User agent

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

Purpose

AI search indexing

Honours robots.txt

Its operator documents robots.txt as the control

Published IP ranges

https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json

Reverse DNS

None documented

Official documentation

Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers

Verified on

2026-10-05

What PerplexityBot does

Perplexity says PerplexityBot 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. [1]

Allow or block PerplexityBot in robots.txt

Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of each host (each scheme and port counts separately) it should apply to. A crawler that finds one or more groups naming its token follows those groups, merged into one, and ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat in them any * rules you still want applied (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1).

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

What blocking PerplexityBot changes

Perplexity ties PerplexityBot to its search results: to appear there, it recommends allowing PerplexityBot and requests from its published IP ranges. [1]

Perplexity says each of its robots.txt settings works independently, and that it may take up to 24 hours for its systems to reflect a change. [1]

How to verify a request really is PerplexityBot

Perplexity recommends combining user-agent matching with IP address verification against its published JSON list, which it says is updated regularly. It documents no reverse-DNS hostname. [1][2]

A crawler policy is one part of being readable by assistants. The AI search readiness guide covers the rest, and robots.txt and crawl access covers the firewall and bot-protection rules that block crawlers before robots.txt is ever read. A full SEO report covers AI search readiness alongside the rest of a site's technical health.