Glossary
What is PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler that indexes web pages so they can appear as sources in Perplexity's answers. Perplexity says it isn't used to train foundation models. A separate agent, Perplexity-User, fetches pages when a user's question requires it. Sites that block PerplexityBot won't be indexed for Perplexity answers.
Why it matters
Perplexity shows sources prominently with every answer, so being indexed is the difference between being cited or not. It's popular with researchers and technical buyers, and its referrals show up in analytics as perplexity.ai.
robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
Perplexity publishes its user agents and IP ranges. Perplexity-User, which acts on a user's request, is documented as generally not following robots.txt because a person asked for the page; it isn't used for indexing.
Example
A founder notices perplexity.ai in her referrers after a statistics page gets indexed. Perplexity cites it whenever users ask about the topic, and the visits come from people researching exactly her market.
Checking access
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges for its bots. Look for PerplexityBot in server or CDN logs and confirm it isn't blocked by a firewall or a CDN "block AI bots" setting. If Perplexity never cites you for questions where you rank well in normal search, crawl access is the first thing to check.
FAQ
Does Perplexity train models on my site?
Perplexity says PerplexityBot is for search indexing, not training foundation models.
Does Perplexity-User follow robots.txt?
Perplexity documents that it generally doesn't, since it fetches pages for users who asked.
How do I see Perplexity traffic?
Look for perplexity.ai in your analytics referrers.
Does Perplexity show my site in answers if I block PerplexityBot?
Perplexity says blocked sites aren't indexed, though a page may still appear as a headline or link if found elsewhere.