PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot is the bot that decides whether Perplexity can find and cite your pages. Perplexity says 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." Perplexity recommends allowing it in robots.txt.

Do not confuse it with Perplexity-User, which supports user actions within Perplexity. Perplexity says that because a user requested the fetch, "this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules." So a Disallow for Perplexity-User is not a dependable control, while a Disallow for PerplexityBot is the documented way to stay out of Perplexity's search results.

After you change robots.txt, Perplexity says "it may take up to 24 hours for our systems to reflect changes."

In your logs, the bot's user-agent string ends with PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot). Remember that a bot with its own robots.txt group ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any paths you still want to keep private.

Example

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /checkout/

Related terms

• OAI-SearchBot
• robots.txt
• User agent
• Citation
• Answer engine

Sources

1. Perplexity Crawlers (opens in a new tab) · Perplexity · Checked 28 Oct 2026
2. RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol (opens in a new tab) · IETF (RFC Editor) · Published Sep 2022