PerplexityBot
Perplexity’s crawler, which indexes pages so they can be cited in its answers.
Measured across 58 domains read on 12 October 2026, against 5.8% on 2 August 2026.
disallow it
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.
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow:Allowed, and said out loud.
Sites that changed their mind
last 90 days- 10 October 2026 (2026-10-10)
- joongang.co.krPerplexityBot was unblocked between 26 September 2026 and 10 October 2026.
- lynk.idPerplexityBot was unblocked between 26 September 2026 and 10 October 2026.
- anota.aiPerplexityBot was unblocked between 26 September 2026 and 10 October 2026.
- 5 October 2026 (2026-10-05)
- thelancet.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 15 September 2026 and 5 October 2026.
- 29 September 2026 (2026-09-29)
- bestjavporn.comPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- utraff.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- bandlab.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- spacebattles.comPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- documentcloud.orgPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- rutracker.orgPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- seekingalpha.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- lectormangass.netPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- sportfilm800.comPerplexityBot was blocked between 15 September 2026 and 29 September 2026.
- 28 September 2026 (2026-09-28)
- pussyspace.comPerplexityBot was blocked between 14 September 2026 and 28 September 2026.
- weather.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 14 September 2026 and 28 September 2026.
- 26 September 2026 (2026-09-26)
- newspapers.comPerplexityBot was blocked between 31 August 2026 and 26 September 2026.
- 11st.co.krPerplexityBot was unblocked between 4 September 2026 and 26 September 2026.
- 16 September 2026 (2026-09-16)
- slrclub.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 1 September 2026 and 16 September 2026.
- 15 September 2026 (2026-09-15)
- wikicv.netPerplexityBot was blocked between 31 August 2026 and 15 September 2026.
- mathrubhumi.comPerplexityBot was unblocked between 31 August 2026 and 15 September 2026.
The other seven
OpenAI’s crawler for gathering web content used to train its models.
The crawler behind ChatGPT’s search surface: it fetches pages so they can be cited in answers.
Anthropic’s crawler, used to gather web content for Claude.
Not a crawler at all. It is a control token: Googlebot still fetches the page, and this decides whether the content may be used for Gemini and for grounding AI Overviews.
The same shape as Google-Extended: a control token, not a crawler. Applebot fetches the page either way; this decides whether the content may train Apple Intelligence.
The crawler behind Common Crawl, a free public archive of the web that most open training corpora are built from.
ByteDance’s crawler, gathering content used for TikTok’s search and for Doubao.
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.