AI crawler directory · Perplexity
PerplexityBot
Indexes pages for Perplexity search and shopping results — Perplexity recommends allowing it for your site to appear.
The verdict
Blocking PerplexityBot costs real visibility — it is the crawler that feeds the surface, not a training bot.
18% of the 50 top DTC stores in Shelfgrade's weekly readiness panel currently block PerplexityBot (2026-W36).
robots.txt
Recommended: allow
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Costs visibility
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Identifying it in your logs
Published user-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Version segments drift — match on the PerplexityBot token, not the full string.
User-agent headers can be spoofed. Perplexity publishes the bot's real IP ranges at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json — verify the requesting IP against that list.
Questions this page answers
What is PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler token. Indexes pages for Perplexity search and shopping results — Perplexity recommends allowing it for your site to appear. Source: the vendor's own crawler documentation (https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots), last re-verified 2026-08-27.
Does blocking PerplexityBot in robots.txt hurt my store's AI visibility?
Blocking PerplexityBot costs real visibility — it is the crawler that feeds the surface, not a training bot.
What does the PerplexityBot user agent look like in server logs?
The vendor-published UA string is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) — note that version segments drift over time; match on the "PerplexityBot" token, not the full string.
How do I verify a request really came from PerplexityBot?
Perplexity publishes the bot's IP ranges as JSON at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json — verify the requesting IP against that list rather than trusting the user-agent header, which anyone can spoof.
Primary source: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots — every Shelfgrade rule links the vendor doc it derives from, re-verified weekly.
Other Perplexity crawlers: Perplexity-User