Perplexity
Perplexity-User
Fetches pages on behalf of Perplexity users.
User-requested fetchAI search
PerplexityBot
Indexes pages for Perplexity search, not foundation-model training.
Operated by Perplexity
See your agent traffic PurposeAI search
HTTP identifierPerplexityBot
IdentityVerify beyond the name
THE SIGNAL
What this visit tells you
Indexing may make information available for answers. A bot hit alone is not a citation, referral or sale.
Public-page coverage
Retrieval failures
Referrals separately
Your next move
Check the availability of the pages you want search systems to retrieve, then measure downstream referrals separately.
The technical details
MarkdownHow to identify it
Look for the PerplexityBot identifier in a request’s User-Agent. This is a name match, not identity verification. Version strings may change.
How to check identity
Compare the request IP with the PerplexityBot IP list linked in Perplexity’s crawler documentation.
Access and robots.txt
Use a PerplexityBot robots.txt group to control search crawling independently of Perplexity-User fetches.
Optional full-site opt-out. Merge with existing rules only if intended. robots.txt does not secure private content.
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Seeing 403 or 404 responses?
403 means access was denied; 404 means the resource was not found. Compare the public path, request time, edge security event and origin response to find the cause.
Separate intended restrictions and secret-file probes from pages that should work. A User-Agent name alone does not justify allowing a request.
SourcesReviewed 2026-09-14
Identity and purpose are based on these sources. Analytics interpretation and suggested checks are Apostl guidance.
APOSTL PulseSee PerplexityBot in context
See their requests. Find the pages that matter.
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