# What Is PerplexityBot and What Happens If You Block It?

> What PerplexityBot is, the crawler Perplexity uses to show and link sites in its results, what happens if you block it and how to verify it.

URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/perplexitybot/
Lang: en

PerplexityBot is the name that the [crawler](/glossary/web-crawler/) of [Perplexity](/glossary/perplexity/), the [AI search](/glossary/ai-search/) engine of the same name, shows up as on your server. It is not the assistant or a feature you install: it is the program that walks websites so Perplexity can show them and link to them. For a store it matters for a concrete reason: **it is the agent that decides whether you appear in Perplexity's results**, and it is easy to block it by accident, tucked into a list of "AI bots" meant to stop model training.

## How it works

Perplexity describes its agents on a page of its documentation. It says two things about PerplexityBot: that it is designed to **surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results**, and that it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. To make sure your site appears in those results, it recommends allowing it in your [robots.txt](/glossary/robots-txt/) and accepting requests that arrive from its published IPs.[^perplexity-bots]

Each agent is managed separately in robots.txt, and Perplexity warns that **a change can take up to 24 hours** to be reflected in its systems.[^perplexity-bots] It is a similar window to the one the standard gives for caching the file: a crawler should not use the stored copy for more than 24 hours.[^rfc9309]

The request arrives with this [user agent](/glossary/user-agent/), in the version Perplexity documents in October 2026:[^perplexity-bots]

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

In robots.txt the short name, `PerplexityBot`, is enough. The standard says each crawler looks for the group that names it, ignoring case, and only if it finds none does it follow the `User-agent: *` group.[^rfc9309]

Alongside PerplexityBot works a second agent, Perplexity-User, which serves user actions: when someone asks a question, it may visit a page to give an exact answer and link it. Perplexity says it **does not crawl the web or collect content to train models**, and that, because a user requests the visit, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.[^perplexity-bots] In practice, PerplexityBot decides whether your store is among what Perplexity can show, and Perplexity-User is the one that opens a specific [product page](/glossary/product-page/) at the moment of a question.

To tell a real visit from one that just uses the name, Perplexity publishes each agent's addresses in a JSON file, and asks you to always use the current version, because they are updated regularly.[^perplexity-bots] The PerplexityBot one we read on October 6, 2026 was dated February 7, 2025 and had **8 standalone IPv4 addresses**, each a `/32` prefix.[^perplexitybot-ips] The Perplexity-User one was dated October 17, 2025 and had 4.[^perplexity-user-ips]

Perplexity also gives instructions for web application firewalls, and the idea holds for any of them: create a rule that **combines the _user agent_ name and the source IP**, with the IPs taken from its official files, and give it priority over the rules that block. It spells it out for Cloudflare WAF and for AWS WAF.[^perplexity-bots] The name alone can be faked; the name and the IP together, much less so.

## In a store

A natural cosmetics store copies a list from a forum to "protect itself from AI" and pastes it into its robots.txt. It is a **made-up example**:

```text
User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
```

The intent was not to hand over its catalog to train models. With [GPTBot](/glossary/gptbot/) and [ClaudeBot](/glossary/claudebot/) the rule does that: OpenAI uses the first to gather content to train its models, and Anthropic the second to collect content to improve theirs.[^openai-bots][^anthropic-bots] With PerplexityBot it does not: Perplexity says it does not use it to train, so **the only consequence of blocking it is dropping out of its search results**.[^perplexity-bots] And the questions a customer asks about that store can still send Perplexity-User to its product pages, because that agent generally does not follow robots.txt.[^perplexity-bots]

The version that does what the store wanted takes PerplexityBot out of the group:

```text
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /checkout

User-agent: GPTBot
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
```

PerplexityBot has no group of its own, so it follows the asterisk one: it can request the product pages, but not the cart or the checkout.[^rfc9309] If the store uses a firewall with rules against bots, one step is missing: allowing PerplexityBot by name and IP, as Perplexity recommends.[^perplexity-bots]


**Blocking PerplexityBot does not protect your content from any training, because PerplexityBot does not crawl for that.** Perplexity says it does not use it to crawl content for AI foundation models; it uses it to surface and link websites in its results.[^perplexity-bots] Putting it on an "anti-AI" blocklist only takes you out of those results. And it does not stop Perplexity from reading your site: the visits a person requests are made by Perplexity-User, which generally ignores robots.txt.[^perplexity-bots]


## How to check it

1. **Open `yourdomain.com/robots.txt` and look for a group that names PerplexityBot.** If there is none, the asterisk group applies: see what it says about the path of your product pages.[^rfc9309]
2. **Review the firewall or CDN.** If you filter bots, check that a rule lets PerplexityBot through by name and by IP, with priority over the blocking ones.[^perplexity-bots]
3. **Look for PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User in the logs** of your server or CDN, and count them separately.
4. **Check each IP against its file**: `perplexitybot.json` for the crawler and `perplexity-user.json` for user visits, in the current version.[^perplexitybot-ips][^perplexity-user-ips]
5. **If you changed something, wait at least a day** before drawing conclusions: Perplexity allows up to 24 hours for a robots.txt change to show.[^perplexity-bots]

## Related concept: OAI-SearchBot

PerplexityBot is more like [OAI-SearchBot](/glossary/oai-searchbot/) than like GPTBot. Both are search agents: OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in [ChatGPT search](/glossary/chatgpt-search/) results, and sites that block it do not appear in the answers of that search.[^openai-bots] And both have next to them an agent for a person's requests, [ChatGPT-User](/glossary/chatgpt-user/) at OpenAI and Perplexity-User at Perplexity, to which robots.txt may not apply.[^openai-bots][^perplexity-bots] The difference is training. OpenAI has a separate crawler for that, GPTBot;[^openai-bots] Perplexity documents none and says its two agents do not collect content to train foundation models.[^perplexity-bots] That is why, **in a blocklist meant against training, PerplexityBot has no place**.

To go further, the guide on [what an AI crawler sees in your store](/guides/what-an-ai-crawler-sees/) goes agent by agent through what each one reads, and the [reading path](/learn/crawling-and-indexing/) for this topic orders the rest of the terms.