Agent-Readiness Grade / Crawlers / PerplexityBot

PerplexityBot

Perplexity · search. Source: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots, read 2026-09-29. Where the vendor page does not state a fact, this page says "not published".

Facts from the vendor page

Operator Perplexity

What it is for Search crawler. Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

Published user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
Full string as published by the vendor.

Honors robots.txt The vendor page recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in results, which implies robots.txt is read, but it does not state in so many words that PerplexityBot obeys it. It does state that the separate Perplexity-User fetcher generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the fetch.

Verification (IP ranges or reverse DNS) Published IP ranges at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json; the page also gives WAF allow-rule guidance combining user-agent and IP matching.

robots.txt token PerplexityBot

Operator	Perplexity
What it is for	Search crawler. Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.
Published user-agent string	`Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)` Full string as published by the vendor.
Honors robots.txt	The vendor page recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in results, which implies robots.txt is read, but it does not state in so many words that PerplexityBot obeys it. It does state that the separate Perplexity-User fetcher generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the fetch.
Verification (IP ranges or reverse DNS)	Published IP ranges at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json; the page also gives WAF allow-rule guidance combining user-agent and IP matching.
robots.txt token	`PerplexityBot`

robots.txt lines

To allow PerplexityBot explicitly (so your policy survives a change to the User-agent: * group):

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

To block it:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

What Agent-Readiness Grade checks for PerplexityBot

The crawler-access area parses your robots.txt by user-agent group and reports PerplexityBot as allowed, disallowed or unmentioned (unmentioned means allowed by default). A group for "PerplexityBot" wins over the "*" group; "Disallow: /" or "Disallow: /*" without a matching "Allow: /" counts as blocked; narrower path rules are reported as partial. PerplexityBot is one of the 8 tokens in that score (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Amazonbot, CCBot, Bytespider).

Context: in the 30-day census of one Cloudflare zone (2026-08-29 to 2026-09-28), 804 requests carried a user agent matching "PerplexityBot". See the census report.

Other crawlers

GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · ClaudeBot · Claude-User · Google-Extended · Amazonbot · CCBot · Bytespider

Free agent-readiness checkers are a crowded category: Goodie, Frase, aiwebreadiness.com, Arobis, Rank Prompt, Otterly and Writesonic each offer one. Of the checkers we looked at, Agent-Readiness Grade is the only one we found that grades payment and agent-checkout surfaces (/.well-known/x402, agent-card.json, mcp-registry-auth, openapi.json, the MCP endpoint) and legal notices. Statement dated 2026-09-29.