Crawlers & control files
PerplexityBot
Perplexity's crawler that surfaces and links websites in its answer engine.
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler, which fetches pages so Perplexity can surface and link them in its AI answers. Because Perplexity is a retrieval-first engine that cites sources openly, keeping PerplexityBot allowed is directly tied to whether you appear in its answers.
Perplexity tends to cite a broader set of sources than ChatGPT, including mid-market and challenger brands with a decent third-party footprint, so it is often the fastest engine to earn visibility on. Blocking its crawler forfeits that opportunity.
The recommended stance for most B2B sites is to allow PerplexityBot and focus on giving it clean, citable passages.
Related terms
AI Crawler
A bot that fetches pages to train or feed AI, not to build a search index.
OAI-SearchBot
OpenAI's crawler that indexes pages so they can be cited in ChatGPT search.
Citation (AI)
When an AI answer attributes or links a specific page as its source.
AI Bot Blocking
Using robots.txt and server rules to stop AI crawlers from accessing your site.
LLM SERP
The set of sources an AI answer cites — the generative stand-in for a results page.
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