PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is the web crawler Perplexity uses to index pages for its AI answer engine, identified by the user-agent PerplexityBot and controllable through robots.txt, and it feeds an engine that runs a fresh web search for every question.
PerplexityBot is the crawler that builds Perplexity's index of the web. It announces itself as PerplexityBot in the user-agent header, follows robots.txt rules for that name, and Perplexity publishes its IP ranges for verification. Perplexity also documents a separate user-agent for fetches a person triggers directly inside a conversation, similar to how OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot from ChatGPT-User.
Perplexity behaves differently from the other engines in a way that makes its crawler more important than its traffic share suggests. According to Profound, Perplexity runs a fresh web search for every query and references about 7.3 domains per response, compared with about 5.0 for ChatGPT and 2.5 for Copilot. More sources per answer means more chances to be one of them, but only if PerplexityBot can read you.
Its sources also overlap surprisingly little with ChatGPT's. Profound found ChatGPT and Perplexity share only 11% of cited domains, with 51.6% of citations exclusive to Perplexity. And Perplexity stays closer to Google's rankings than the others: Ahrefs found 28.6% of Perplexity-cited URLs ranked in Google's top 10 for the original prompt, versus around 8% for ChatGPT. If you rank well on Google, Perplexity is the engine most likely to reflect that.
One more thing worth knowing about Perplexity's sources: Reddit was about 46.7% of Perplexity's citations on commercial queries in 2025, measured by Profound as a share among its top cited domains, and that share reportedly fell to around 24% by January 2026. Those figures come from general commercial queries, not local ones, so don't assume they describe how Perplexity answers a plumber search in your town.
For a small business, PerplexityBot should almost always be allowed. Perplexity is about 7.23% of AI referral traffic according to Similarweb-family data, and its per-answer citation count is high. Tibly's AI-readiness audit probes your site as PerplexityBot to confirm it's reachable, and Tibly scores Perplexity separately from the other six engines it tracks.
Keep exploring the glossary
- AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended that fetches web pages so an AI company can train its models or retrieve current information to answer user questions.
- OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot is the OpenAI crawler that indexes web pages for ChatGPT's search features, so a site that blocks it can't be fetched or linked when ChatGPT searches the web, and it is separate from GPTBot, OpenAI's training crawler.
- Citation (AI answer)In an AI answer, a citation is a source the engine references or links to while generating its response, and the number of sources cited per answer varies widely by engine, from about 2.5 for Copilot up to about 7.7 for Google AI Overviews.
- robots.txt for AI Crawlersrobots.txt for AI crawlers means using the robots.txt file at your site's root to allow or block named AI bots such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, deciding which AI systems may read your pages for training or live answers.
Common questions about PerplexityBot
- Is Perplexity's source list the same as ChatGPT's?
- No. Profound found the two engines overlap on only 11% of cited domains. Perplexity also tracks Google rankings more closely: Ahrefs found 28.6% of Perplexity's cited URLs ranked in Google's top 10, versus about 8% for ChatGPT. Treat them as separate targets.
- Does Perplexity favor recently published content?
- You may have read that Perplexity boosts pages published in the last 30 days. That claim is unsourced. What Profound did document is that Perplexity runs a fresh web search per query, so updated pages can be picked up quickly, but nobody has measured a recency bonus.
- Should I block PerplexityBot?
- Not if you want to be recommended by Perplexity. It's the crawler that feeds an engine citing about 7.3 domains per answer, per Profound, which is more room to be named than most engines offer. Blocking it removes your pages from that pool. Decide separately about training crawlers like GPTBot.