AI crawlers · Answer engines
PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is the answer-engine crawler run by Perplexity: Perplexity index. Its operator publishes the IP ranges it crawls from (https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json), so a request carrying the name can be checked against that list.
| User-agent token | PerplexityBot |
| Operator | Perplexity |
| What it does | Perplexity index |
| Kind | answer-engine crawler |
| Can a request be verified? | Yes — published ip feed |
| Verification source | https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json |
| In a CrawlCheck scan | Sent as a request on every scan; a refusal is scored |
Allow or block it in robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Add a group that names it: "User-agent: PerplexityBot" followed by "Disallow: /". A crawler follows only the most specific group that names it, so once a group names PerplexityBot, rules under "User-agent: *" no longer apply to it; repeat in that group any Disallow lines you still want.
What blocking it changes
Yes. It is how Perplexity reaches a page to answer a question or to build the index its answers read, so refusing it stops that engine reading the site.
What it actually did on crawlcheck.io
| Verified requests | 10,694 |
| Requests using its name from outside its operator's ranges | 84 (0.8% of claims) |
| robots.txt fetched | 140 times |
| Fetches of paths robots.txt disallows | 23 |
| Observed | 2026-08-13 to 2026-10-30 |
Measured on this site’s own traffic, verified against the operator’s published ranges. Every agent’s record: agent conduct.
Other agents from Perplexity
Perplexity-User— Perplexity live fetch
See what PerplexityBot and every other named agent receive from your own site: run a free scan. The full catalogue is on AI crawlers and as JSON at /ai-crawlers.json.