PerplexityBot

What is PerplexityBot?

PerplexityBot is Perplexity AI's crawler: it visits websites to index them so the answer engine can cite them later. It's controlled from robots.txt. Perplexity also declares Perplexity-User, the agent that visits a page the moment it's answering someone who just asked about it. They're two different roles in the same pipeline, and blocking one leaves things half-broken without anything visibly changing: the site keeps working exactly the same for people.

Related terms

robots.txt

The file that tells crawlers which parts of your site they can access.

ClaudeBot

Anthropic's crawler. Two other names are handled separately.

Citation

The link an answer engine uses to show where a claim came from.

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