PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to discover and index pages it can surface and cite in its answer engine. Perplexity also operates Perplexity-User for fetches triggered directly by a user query. Both are documented with user agents and IP ranges, and PerplexityBot respects robots.txt directives.

Perplexity is, by design, a citation-first product: its interface foregrounds the sources it used. That makes it the cleanest place to observe whether your AEO work is paying off, because you can see exactly which of your pages got cited for which query. The same constraints apply as for the other engines: the bot reads raw HTML, prefers concise question-and-answer passages, and leans on corroboration and recency.

There was public controversy in 2024 about whether some Perplexity fetches respected robots.txt; Perplexity has since clarified its agent behavior and published its crawler documentation. For site owners, the practical stance is unchanged: allow the agents you want to be cited by, keep your answer content in the raw HTML, structure it into extractable passages, and verify citations directly in the Perplexity interface.