Perplexity crawlers: what each bot does
Perplexity runs 2 bots that we document: PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User. They have different jobs (ai search crawler, ai user-triggered fetcher), so a robots.txt rule for one does not apply to the others.
| Bot | Category | robots.txt token | Honors robots.txt? | What blocking does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | AI search crawler | PerplexityBot | Yes, per Perplexity | Perplexity says sites should allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt for their pages to appear in its search results. |
| Perplexity-User | AI user-triggered fetcher | Perplexity-User | Generally ignored (user-initiated) | Because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules for this agent. |
No request from a Perplexity bot has been recorded on our sites in the last 30 days. Bot traffic data