PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot is the crawler that builds Perplexity’s search index. It identifies itself with the token PerplexityBot and, per Perplexity’s documentation, honours robots.txt. Pages it cannot fetch are not indexed and therefore are not offered as sources in Perplexity answers.

Perplexity-User

Perplexity documents a second agent, Perplexity-User, which fetches a page when a user’s question requires it. The documentation states that because these fetches are initiated by a person, they generally do not follow robots.txt restrictions. That means a page can be quoted in a single answer even if PerplexityBot is blocked, but it will not be retrievable from the index for other questions.

Policy

If appearing as a Perplexity source matters, allow PerplexityBot. If the concern is server load, rate limiting at the CDN is the practical control. Perplexity publishes its crawler IP ranges for verification.

Our AI crawler access tool fetches a URL as PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User and reports what each receives.

For the documented user-agent string, the robots.txt rules and how to verify a request, see the PerplexityBot reference page.