AI crawlers · Perplexity
Is your site blocking PerplexityBot?
PerplexityBot is the crawler behind Perplexity search index. Check your site now: we read your robots.txt exactly as PerplexityBot must, ask your server as each AI crawler, and look at your product pages.
Does blocking it hurt?
AI search and answers Blocking PerplexityBot keeps your shop out of Perplexity search index: your pages can't be read there, so they can't be shown or recommended.
In our research, 1% of 2,159 online shops block PerplexityBot in robots.txt. See the research.
Allow or block it in robots.txt
Perplexity says PerplexityBot follows robots.txt, so the lines below decide whether it reads your shop.
To let it in (add to your robots.txt, at yourshop.com/robots.txt):
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
To keep it out:
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
A more specific group wins: if your robots.txt also has a group for PerplexityBot, that group decides, not the “User-agent: *” rules. Our check reads it the same way (RFC 9309).
Other places it gets blocked
- Cloudflare. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new sites since July 2025, and it can also write your robots.txt for you. If your site uses Cloudflare, check its AI crawler settings first (MIT Technology Review).
- Security plugins and firewalls. WordPress security plugins and host firewalls sometimes refuse crawlers they don’t recognise, even when robots.txt allows them. Our check asks your server as each crawler and shows any refusal.
Where this comes from
Perplexity’s own documentation: docs.perplexity.ai. Perplexity docs: the indexing crawler; allow it in robots.txt to appear in results.
Perplexity’s other crawlers
- Perplexity-User (Opens pages when a person asks)
We check 18 AI crawlers in one go. See them all · How the check works