Bots by company
Perplexity bots and crawlers
Perplexity runs an AI answer engine that cites its sources. It operates one indexing bot and one user-requested fetcher.
Perplexity bots at a glance
- Perplexity runs 2 bots listed in this directory.
- They belong to: AI Assistant Fetchers, AI Search Crawlers.
- Each Perplexity bot has its own robots.txt token, so each purpose can be allowed or blocked separately.
- Website: www.perplexity.ai
Every Perplexity bot
| Bot | Group | Purpose | robots.txt | For GEO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity-User | AI Assistant Fetchers | AI assistantOfficial docs | Not for user-requested fetches | Allow |
| PerplexityBot | AI Search Crawlers | AI searchOfficial docs | Yes | Allow |
Block or allow all Perplexity bots
The rules below name every Perplexity token in this directory. To block training but keep AI search, delete the search and assistant tokens from the block rule.
robots.txt: block
# Block all Perplexity bots
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow all Perplexity bots
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep all Perplexity bots out of private areas only
User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to all Perplexity bots
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Perplexity\-User|PerplexityBot)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to all Perplexity bots
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Perplexity\-User|PerplexityBot) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Perplexity-User") or (http.user_agent contains "PerplexityBot")See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
