Published 2026-10-31

PerplexityBot: The User-Agent Behind Perplexity's Citations

PerplexityBot is the crawler that lets Perplexity cite your pages in its answers. Here's the user-agent, how it differs from Perplexity's live fetcher, the robots.txt to allow it, and the honest caveat about Perplexity and robots.txt.

Perplexity leans harder on cited sources than most AI answer engines — which makes being in its index genuinely valuable for a store. The crawler that puts you there is PerplexityBot.

What PerplexityBot is

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot

PerplexityBot indexes web pages so Perplexity can surface and cite them when it answers. For an e-commerce store, those citations are how Perplexity sends shoppers to your products and guides.

Perplexity also operates a separate user-triggered fetch (sometimes seen as Perplexity-User) that retrieves a specific page in real time when a user's question requires it — much like ChatGPT-User. The indexing bot builds the library; the user fetch opens a specific page on demand.

The honest caveat

Perplexity has been reported to retrieve content in ways that don't always respect robots.txt, which has drawn criticism. Set your rules the way you want them regardless — a clear Allow is also a clear signal — but know that, unlike Google's or OpenAI's crawlers, PerplexityBot's compliance has been questioned publicly. Treat robots.txt as your stated intent, not a guarantee of behaviour.

The robots.txt to allow citations

# Let Perplexity index and cite your store
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

For a store that wants to be cited in Perplexity's answers, you want this open. Blocking it opts you out of Perplexity's sourced recommendations.

Check it by name

Run your store through the AI crawler & robot checker — see, per bot, whether PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot and the rest can reach you.
Scan your store's AI readiness — crawler access is one piece of whether AI engines can read and recommend your products.

FoundGPT helps Shopify stores get read, recommended and sold by AI engines across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Start with a free AI-readiness scan.