PerplexityBot

What user agent does PerplexityBot use?

Perplexity publishes this user agent string for PerplexityBot.

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

How do I block PerplexityBot?

Perplexity says PerplexityBot will not index the text of a site that disallows it, though it may still index the domain, the headline and a short factual summary. A change can take up to 24 hours.

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your site:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

How do I check that a PerplexityBot visit is real?

Anyone can put a crawler’s name in a user agent, so the name alone proves nothing.

Perplexity recommends matching the user agent and checking the IP address against the list it publishes, which it updates regularly.

Spreelytics runs this check for you. Every crawl that claims to be PerplexityBot is compared with the IP ranges Perplexity publishes, refreshed every 12 hours, and one from outside them counts as spoofed.

How do I see PerplexityBot visits on my site?

Your server’s access logs record the user agent of each request, so you can search them for “PerplexityBot”.

Or add the Spreelytics server middleware, @spreelytics/ai-crawl. It recognises PerplexityBot by its user agent and counts each visit on the Bots page under Indexing, apart from your visitor numbers.

Sources: docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers, www.perplexity.ai/help-center/en/articles/10354969-how-does-perplexity-follow-robots-txt