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Perplexity's AI agents and crawlers

Perplexity runs 2 agents that visit websites: 1 AI assistant, 1 AI and search crawler. Here's what each one does, and how to let them in or keep them out.

AI assistants

Fetches pages for a person, in real time, while they use an AI assistant. Almost always allow it. Blocking it means the assistant can't read your pages when a customer asks about you, so it answers from somewhere else.

  • Perplexity-User: Fetches a page when someone using Perplexity asks a question that needs it. It acts for one person, in real time.

Indexes pages so a search engine or AI search tool can find, cite and link to them. Allow it, unless you deliberately want to stay out of that search engine. Blocking it removes you from its results and answers.

  • PerplexityBot: Crawls the web so Perplexity can find, cite and link to sites in its answers. Perplexity says it isn't used to train foundation models.

Robots.txt for every Perplexity agent

To block every Perplexity agent that reads robots.txt. This also keeps out the ones acting for your customers and the ones that send you visitors, so think twice:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

Robots.txt is a request, not a lock, and some agents that act for a person in real time may not read it. A decision guide for blocking or allowing AI crawlers.

How to tell if it's really Perplexity

Perplexity publishes ways to check that a request really came from it:

Requests that use Perplexity's names but fail these checks are impostors. Ghost Agent Lab checks every request this way. How to verify AI crawlers.

Which Perplexity agents visit your site? Ghost Agent Lab reads your CDN or server logs and shows every request from them: what they read, what your site sent back, and whether each one was genuine. See agent traffic, or check whether AI agents can use your site for free.