PerplexityBot is Perplexity AI's web crawler, which indexes web content to power Perplexity's answer engine. Per Perplexity's help center, PerplexityBot respects robots.txt — a page disallowed for it won't have its full or partial text indexed, though the domain and a brief factual summary may still appear.
A separate, user-triggered fetcher
Perplexity also operates Perplexity-User, which fetches a specific page when a person directly asks Perplexity about it — a different behavior pattern from a background crawl, similar to how OpenAI's ChatGPT-User and Anthropic's Claude-User work. Site owners deciding whether to block Perplexity's crawlers should check current documentation directly, since exactly how user-triggered fetches interact with robots.txt has been a point of public disagreement between AI vendors and some publishers.
On Shopify, WordPress, and Next.js
Same access mechanics as any other named crawler — explicit allow rules in robots.txt. Verify current status with a free scan.