PerplexityBot

What PerplexityBot does

PerplexityBot builds the index Perplexity draws on to answer questions with cited sources. Perplexity documents the user agent and says it honors robots.txt. In 2024-2025, network operators and infrastructure companies published evidence of Perplexity-associated crawling that did not identify itself - including reports of fetches continuing under generic browser user agents after the declared bot was blocked. Perplexity disputes aspects of those reports, arguing some of the traffic reflects user-initiated fetching rather than crawling. We label robots compliance unclear on that basis; the dispute itself is a useful case study in how contested bot identity has become.

Why it visits your site

Perplexity answers lean heavily on current, authoritative pages, so news, documentation, and reference content get crawled often.

The bigger picture: AI search bots

AI search bots are the closest thing the AI era has to the old search bargain: they index your pages so an answer engine can cite and link them. When ChatGPT search or Perplexity answers with your page as a source, the crawl that preceded it is what made the citation possible. Referral volume from these engines is still small next to Google, but it is qualitatively different traffic - a reader who clicks through from a cited answer arrives having already been told your page is the authority on their question.

The strategic mistake to avoid is lumping these bots in with training crawlers under one blanket "block AI" rule. The major operators deliberately split their tokens so that training and search indexing can be controlled separately. A site that blocks everything AI-shaped removes itself from the one AI channel that links back - usually the opposite of what the blanket rule intended.

Should you block it?

Perplexity cites and links sources prominently, and its users click through at meaningful rates, so allowing it has a real referral upside - Perplexity has also launched a revenue-sharing publisher program, a sign of which way it wants the relationship to go. If you decide to block and want certainty, use server-level 403s rather than robots.txt alone, given the compliance questions.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask PerplexityBot to stay away:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see PerplexityBot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every PerplexityBot request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because PerplexityBot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to PerplexityBot and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.