PerplexityBot
How to allow or block PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot fetches pages for Perplexity's answers. Perplexity-User is the fetch a person requests.
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the crawler used to index pages for answers, and Perplexity-User as the agent that fetches a URL when someone asks. They publish the user-agent strings and say robots.txt is how you allow or block PerplexityBot.
If you want to be cited, PerplexityBot has to be allowed to fetch the page, and the page has to contain the words in the HTML. A client-rendered shell gives the crawler nothing to quote.
Blocking PerplexityBot does not block Google. Put the rule in its own group.
What to check
- Read Perplexity's bot documentation for the current user-agent.
- Add a PerplexityBot group that matches the choice you want.
- Confirm the URL returns the article HTML, not a challenge page.
Fix prompt
Example prompt
Add a robots.txt group for PerplexityBot. Allow it if this site should be fetchable for Perplexity answers, or disallow it if not. Do not change the Googlebot group. Do not call an indexing API.
Check a URL · Crawlers · Glossary
Questions
- Will a block remove old answers?
- A robots rule stops future fetches. It does not edit answers Perplexity already wrote.