Definition
PerplexityBot is Perplexity AI's web crawler, used to build and refresh the index that powers Perplexity's search answers. Perplexity is among the most citation-heavy answer engines — it links sources inline for nearly every factual claim — making it a high-value channel for brands that produce evidence-dense content. Blocking PerplexityBot via robots.txt removes your pages from Perplexity's proprietary index; however, Perplexity also retrieves results from Bing's index, so a block may reduce but not eliminate your appearance in answers. Perplexity also documents a separate user-triggered fetcher for pages a reader pastes or asks about directly; that agent is distinct from the indexing crawler and should be evaluated on its own line in robots.txt. The pragmatic GEO stance for most brands is to allow PerplexityBot: Perplexity's citation-heavy format means every appearance is a branded, clickable link. Because user-agent strings are trivially spoofed, verify real PerplexityBot traffic by reverse DNS lookup against Perplexity's published documentation before making robots.txt decisions on log data alone.