In one sentence
PerplexityBot is the user agent of Perplexity's crawler, which Perplexity documents as designed to surface and link websites in its search results, not to train foundation models.
What it means
Perplexity documents a second agent, Perplexity-User, used when a person asks a question that triggers a page fetch. Perplexity answers with numbered sources by default, so being indexable is closely tied to being cited.
That makes access control here more direct than for training crawlers. If PerplexityBot cannot fetch a page, that page is unlikely to be indexed for Perplexity search, and it will not appear in its citations.
What to do about it
Allow PerplexityBot on pages you want cited. Confirm that CDN or bot-protection rules are not blocking it even where robots.txt allows it, using the AI crawler access checker. Check Perplexity's documentation for current user agent details.
Because Perplexity shows its sources prominently, it is a quick place to check whether a change worked. Publish or fix a page, confirm the crawler can fetch it, and watch whether it starts to appear among the citations for the relevant prompts.
How Pineprompt measures it
Pineprompt records the sources Perplexity cites for each tracked prompt in the Perplexity visibility tracker.
Frequently asked
- What is PerplexityBot?
- PerplexityBot is the user agent of Perplexity's crawler, which Perplexity documents as designed to surface and link websites in its search results, not to train foundation models.
- How does Pineprompt measure PerplexityBot?
- Pineprompt records the sources Perplexity cites for each tracked prompt in the Perplexity visibility tracker.