PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot indexes web pages for an AI-powered search product operated by Perplexity. Unlike a pure training crawler, AI search crawlers are designed to drive users back to the original source via citations and links.
The crawl pattern looks similar to a traditional search engine: regular, broad, and bounded by your robots.txt directives. The difference is that ranking is done by an LLM, not a classic ranking algorithm.
Allowing PerplexityBot is generally how your site stays discoverable inside AI answer engines. The traffic it sends back is small but high-intent: users who clicked a citation usually wanted exactly what you wrote.
See PerplexityBot on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
Known UA examples
example 1
Verify by IP
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
Published IP ranges
Crawl frequency
Continuous
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Yes
Perplexity runs 7 bots in total. Each one is a separate user-agent so you can allow or block them independently.
Agentic Browser
3Agentic Commerce
2Live-Fetch AI
1AI Search Index
1- PerplexityBotYou are here
Share of AI bot traffic
0.70%
↑ 250% vs 12 mo ago
% of top sites blocking it
67%
↑ 22% vs 12 mo ago
Top page categories crawled
AI Search Indexs as a category, share of all bot traffic
5.9%
↑ 556% vs 12 mo ago
Sum of every ai search index we have public stats on. Compare to PerplexityBot's individual trend above to see if it's pulling ahead of its category or falling behind.
Crawl-to-click ratio
195 : 1
For every 1,000 fetches, this agent sends ~5.1 human visits back. Cloudflare crawl-to-click data
Snapshot updated
2026-04
Connect Agent Analytics for daily, per-site numbers.
Source: Cloudflare Radar AI Insights, Cloudflare 'crawl-to-click gap' blog (Aug 2025), Vercel 'Rise of the AI crawler' (Dec 2024), BuzzStream 2026 news-site blocking study
Should I let PerplexityBot through?
In most cases, yes. AI search crawlers cite and link back. Allowing is how your content becomes discoverable inside AI answers. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking PerplexityBot affect my Google rankings?
No. PerplexityBot feeds Perplexity's AI answer engine, which is a separate distribution channel from classical search. Blocking it removes you from citations inside Perplexity's product, but Google and Bing keep ranking you the same.
How do I confirm a request is really from PerplexityBot?
Two checks. The User-Agent header should match a known PerplexityBot string, and the request's source IP should fall inside Perplexity's published ranges. The User-Agent alone is trivially spoofable, so the IP check is what gives you confidence. Perplexity publishes the ranges so you can validate at the CDN or edge.
How is PerplexityBot different from Googlebot?
Both crawl the web, but they feed completely different surfaces. Googlebot powers Google Search, where you compete for ten blue links. PerplexityBot powers Perplexity's AI answer engine, where you compete for one of a handful of citations in a written-out paragraph. The crawl mechanics are similar, the consumption pattern is not.
How is PerplexityBot different from Perplexity's other bots?
Perplexity splits work across multiple user-agents so site owners can decide on each one independently. Training crawlers, live-fetch agents, search indexers, and agentic browsers each get their own name. Worth scanning the rest of the Perplexity family above to see which ones actually matter for your site.
What's the cleanest way to control PerplexityBot?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.
Verify everything above against the operator's own documentation.