What is PerplexityBot?

PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler that maintains the retrieval index feeding its answer engine; a companion user-agent, Perplexity-User, fetches a page live when a user follows a citation. Both feed the answer surface, so a brand that wants to be cited on Perplexity should allow both in robots.txt. Perplexity is a citation-forward engine — it renders sources prominently for nearly every answer — which makes access to PerplexityBot unusually high-value relative to the effort: a single allow directive keeps the brand eligible for one of the most citation-visible answer surfaces in 2026. As with the other major engines, blocking PerplexityBot removes the brand from Perplexity answers regardless of content quality, and the access decision is upstream of every retrieval, rerank, and freshness optimization.