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Is my site blocked from Perplexity?
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Perplexity's search results come from PerplexityBot, which Perplexity documents as the crawler that surfaces and links websites in its search results, not one that collects content for training models. Perplexity-User is separate: it visits a page when a user asks Perplexity a question, and Perplexity says that, since a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules. Perplexity says each setting works independently and changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.
Source: Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers, read .
Eight requests: robots.txt, the homepage as a browser, and the homepage as six AI crawlers. Nothing is stored.
The crawlers that decide it for Perplexity
- PerplexityBotPerplexity
- Surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results. Not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. (Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers, read )In this check: robots.txt verdict, and the homepage requested with its user agent.
- Perplexity-UserPerplexity
- Visits a page when a user asks Perplexity a question. Not used for training. (Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers, read )In this check: Not in this check. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules, so a robots.txt verdict would not describe it, and its user agent is not among the six probed.
Other ways a site is invisible to Perplexity
Crawler access is the first condition of AI visibility, not the only one. This check does not measure the following.
- JavaScript-only content. PerplexityBot fetches pages without running their JavaScript, in an analysis of hundreds of millions of crawler fetches. Text that only appears after JavaScript runs is not in what it reads. (Vercel and MERJ, The rise of the AI crawler (December 2024))
- Not in Perplexity's own index. Perplexity maintains its own index through PerplexityBot, so a page PerplexityBot has not fetched is not in it, whatever its standing in Google or Bing. (Perplexity crawler documentation, via our research paper)
The free audit crawls up to 25 pages the way an answer engine reads them and reports pages whose content only appears with JavaScript, pages marked noindex and blocked crawlers, with the evidence. Whether a page is in a search index is reported by the index's owner, in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools; neither this check nor the audit sees it.