What is PerplexityBot ?
PerplexityBot is the official crawler operated by Perplexity AI. Unlike Perplexity-User, which reflects real-time user prompts, PerplexityBot is an automated agent used to index and prefetch content for retrieval-augmented generation. It is responsible for building internal knowledge indexes that support faster and more contextually accurate answers across the platform.
Who is operating PerplexityBot ?
PerplexityBot is operated by Perplexity AI, Inc., a U.S.-based company focused on building hybrid AI search systems. The bot is part of their backend infrastructure and is documented in several web transparency platforms. As of 2024, the company has acknowledged use of its own crawler for populating response contexts in its answer engine.
Why you should be interested in PerplexityBot ?
Unlike Perplexity-User, which acts on-demand, PerplexityBot crawls proactively and can lead to large-scale ingestion of your site’s content. If left unfiltered, it can replicate substantial parts of your content and make them accessible in summarized form through Perplexity’s answers. It does not serve search indexing like Googlebot—it serves a model training and response augmentation purpose. That distinction matters if you wish to control AI exposure.
How to block PerplexityBot ?
1. robots.txt File:
# block PerplexityBot User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
2. Server Filtering:
Use server rules to block the user-agent string “PerplexityBot”.
3. Watch cloud IPs:
The bot may operate from standard hosting providers, not from dedicated ranges.
About the bot
Owner: Perplexity AI, Inc.
Owner URL: perplexity.ai
Bot URL: perplexity.ai
Bot User Agent: PerplexityBot
Respects robots.txt: Yes
