UltraScout AI › Learn › How to check and manage PerplexityBot access to your website?

PerplexityBot Access Guide: How to Check & Manage

Perplexity AI uses a crawler called PerplexityBot to fetch live web content for its answers. Unlike some AI models that rely on training data, Perplexity always retrieves current information.

Why PerplexityBot matters

Perplexity AI serves over 780 million monthly searches. If PerplexityBot is blocked, your content will never appear in Perplexity answers — regardless of authority or relevance.

How to check PerplexityBot access

Manual method

Visit https://yoursite.com/robots.txt and search for:

User-agent: PerplexityBot

• Followed by Disallow: / — Blocked
• Followed by Allow: / — Allowed
• Missing — No explicit rules (defaults to allowed — but check catch-all rules)

Automated method (recommended)

UltraScout's free AI SEO Score instantly scans your robots.txt and shows:

• PerplexityBot status (allowed/blocked/missing)
• Impact on your overall AI visibility
• Recommendations

How to allow PerplexityBot

Add to your robots.txt:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Place this before any global User-agent: * rules.

How to block PerplexityBot

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

PerplexityBot technical details

Why you should allow PerplexityBot

• Perplexity cites sources prominently with clickable links
• High-intent commercial traffic from Perplexity users
• Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity always retrieves fresh content