PerplexityBot

Operator

Perplexity

Type

AI Search Crawler

Official page

docs.perplexity.ai

robots.txt token

PerplexityBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to Perplexity.

Published IP ranges

perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results. Perplexity says it isn't used for AI model training.

PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

Perplexity

User agent

Requests from PerplexityBot carry a user agent like this:

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

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

PerplexityBot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow PerplexityBot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

we recommend allowing PerplexityBot in your site’s robots.txt file and permitting requests from our published IP ranges listed below.

Perplexity

Webmasters can use the following robots.txt tags to manage how their sites and content interact with Perplexity.

Perplexity

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts PerplexityBot

Vireo keeps requests from PerplexityBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over PerplexityBot's user agents.

Sources

• Perplexity: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• PerplexityBot information page (docs.perplexity.ai)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)