What is PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is the web crawler for Perplexity AI that indexes web content to power the AI search engine's real-time information retrieval and answer generation capabilities, enabling conversational search experiences. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Perplexity |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
PerplexityBot revisits your site on a flexible schedule, often requesting several pages in a burst. Activity usually increases when your content changes or its index refreshes, with quiet intervals between crawl passes.
PerplexityBot's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) |
How To Block PerplexityBot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block PerplexityBot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI search crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: PerplexityBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/perplexitybot
Disallow: /Global Statistics for PerplexityBot
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
18% of top websites block PerplexityBot in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Search Crawler Traffic
1.9% of all web traffic came from AI search crawlers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by PerplexityBot.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block PerplexityBot?
Usually not. Blocking PerplexityBot keeps your pages out of its AI search results and can eliminate referral traffic from that channel. It does not improve traditional search rankings. For context, 18% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for PerplexityBot.
Does PerplexityBot Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. PerplexityBot is expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether PerplexityBot respects it.
Does PerplexityBot Access Private Content?
No special access. PerplexityBot can reach only content available to anonymous visitors. Make sure staging sites and other sensitive areas require authentication.
Why Is PerplexityBot Visiting My Website?
PerplexityBot is updating an AI search index so your pages can appear in its results. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or mentions of your domain.
How Can I Tell if PerplexityBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from PerplexityBot and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using PerplexityBot's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "PerplexityBot". Look for bursts that follow links across several pages and recur over time. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be PerplexityBot.