Perplexity is a search engine that writes its answer and footnotes it. Every answer links its sources, so the question isn’t whether it cites anyone but whether it cites you. Here is how it finds pages, from Perplexity’s own documentation.
Perplexity says it uses AI to “search the internet in real-time” and that “each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources” (Perplexity Help Center). Perplexity presents itself as search first, with the answer written on top of the results. That makes it the most search-like of the assistants: what it can find and fetch today decides what it says.
| User agent | What Perplexity says it does | robots.txt | Top sites blocking it |
|---|---|---|---|
PerplexityBot | Surfaces and links websites in Perplexity’s search results; not used to train foundation models | Allow it to appear in results | 8.9% |
Perplexity-User | Visits a page when a user’s question needs it, and may link it in the answer | “Generally ignores robots.txt rules”, because a user asked | 6.0% |
Descriptions from Perplexity’s crawler documentation. Blocking shares are of 4,762 robots.txt files from the Tranco top 10,000, read October 28, 2026 (method).
Top sites block PerplexityBot more than any other AI search crawler: 425 of 4,762, rising to 12.1% in the top 1,000. Several big sites, Yahoo and Prime Video among them, block PerplexityBot while leaving OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s search crawlers alone. That is a choice they are entitled to make; just make sure your own block, if you have one, is a choice too.
Perplexity also asks sites behind a web application firewall to allowlist both crawlers by user agent and by its published IP ranges together, and notes that changes can take up to 24 hours to apply.
perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json.Perplexity runs on your own API key in Mentioned, alongside Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini on ours. A check asks five buyer questions about your category and stores the full answers with their sources, so you can see which domains Perplexity relies on and whether yours is one. For referral traffic, Perplexity visits show up in GA4 under its own domain; this guide has the filter.
Related: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Copilot.
Perplexity says it searches the web in real time for authoritative sources and adds numbered citations to every answer. It doesn’t publish a ranking formula. Practically, a page has to be crawlable by PerplexityBot and answer the question clearly to be a candidate.
Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in its results. Its user-triggered fetcher, Perplexity-User, generally ignores robots.txt because a person asked for the page, according to Perplexity’s crawler documentation.
In our October 2026 crawl of the Tranco top 10,000, 8.9% of 4,762 sites with a readable robots.txt disallowed PerplexityBot from their homepage, more than any other AI search crawler.