PerplexityBot
Perplexity’s crawler, which indexes pages so they can be cited in its answers.
10.6% of the 2,228 domains Domduck read on disallow it, against 5.8% on .
What blocking PerplexityBot costs
Your pages stop being eligible as Perplexity citations. Perplexity shows sources prominently, so this is a visible referral channel rather than a background one.
What it does not cost
It has no effect on conventional search rankings.
Perplexity has been reported fetching pages from agents that do not identify themselves as PerplexityBot. A robots.txt rule is a request, and this page reports what your file SAYS, which is not the same as what every crawler does.
How to block it
or allow it explicitlyUser-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /To allow it and say so, use a bare Disallow: with nothing after it, which RFC 9309 defines as “nothing is disallowed”. That matters more than it looks: a file that never names an agent leaves it in a third state, neither allowed nor blocked, and a catch-all rule added later will block it without anyone deciding to.
Block rate over time
2 daysThe percentage of domains in the corpus whose robots.txt disallows PerplexityBot, measured once per domain per pass. The denominator is how many domains were read that day and is stored with each point, so the line is not restated when the corpus grows.
The other seven
- OpenAI
- GPTBot
- OpenAI
- OAI-SearchBot
- Anthropic
- ClaudeBot
- Google-Extended
- Apple
- Applebot-Extended
- Common Crawl
- CCBot
- ByteDance
- Bytespider
How this page is made
The explanation above is written by a person. The numbers are computed from Domduck’s own daily reads of each domain’s robots.txt, parsed to RFC 9309 rather than searched for a string: a rule binds to the nearest preceding group of user-agent lines, the longest matching pattern wins, and Allow breaks a tie. No prefix matching is done, so a group naming Google is not treated as a policy about Google-Extended. What the collectors have read.