Is Perplexity good for SEO, and how does Perplexity find websites?

15 October 2026 · By John Carlsson

Perplexity is a separate search channel worth being visible in, because its answers link to the websites they draw on. It finds sites mainly through PerplexityBot, its search crawler, which Perplexity says is not used to collect training data. A second agent, Perplexity-User, fetches pages when a user asks something. To be eligible, allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and in your firewall.

How Perplexity finds websites

Perplexity's crawler documentation lists two agents:

PerplexityBot: designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity's search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Its user agent includes PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.
Perplexity-User: supports user actions. When someone asks a question, it may visit a page and link to it in the answer. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or for collecting training content. Its user agent includes Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.

Perplexity's help centre adds that PerplexityBot indexes pages in a similar way to other search engines, and that Perplexity also uses third-party crawlers, whose agreements it says it has updated so they respect robots.txt.

Is it good for SEO?

Perplexity is a separate product from Google, with its own crawler and its own rules. Being visible there does not change your Google rankings, and your Google rankings do not decide whether Perplexity cites you. What it offers is another place where people ask questions and see links to the sources behind each answer.

The work overlaps with good SEO: pages that load for crawlers, answer the question in readable text and are not blocked. The one Perplexity-specific step is making sure PerplexityBot is allowed, which Perplexity itself recommends. Because Perplexity says PerplexityBot indexes pages in a similar way to other search engines, the basics that let any crawler reach and read your pages apply here too, starting with a robots.txt file that does not block it.

robots.txt and firewall settings

To make sure PerplexityBot can crawl you, check robots.txt for a blanket block and, if you want to be explicit, add:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Perplexity says each robots.txt setting works independently and that it may take up to 24 hours for its systems to reflect a change.

If you use a web application firewall, Perplexity gives specific guidance:

Cloudflare: create a custom rule matching a user agent containing PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User and a source IP within the published ranges, with the action set to Allow.
AWS WAF: create IP sets for each bot and string match conditions for the user agents, combine them in allow rules, and give those rules higher priority than any blocking rules.

The IP lists are at perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json and perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Perplexity recommends refreshing them regularly because they change.

What blocking does and does not do

Blocking PerplexityBot in robots.txt stops it indexing the full or partial text of your pages. Perplexity's help centre says it may still index the domain, headline and a brief factual summary.
Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt, because the fetch was requested by a user.
Perplexity says it does not build foundation models, so your content will not be used for model pre-training whether you allow the bots or not.

Checking whether Perplexity cites you

Perplexity does not offer a webmaster report like Search Console. Ask Perplexity the questions your customers ask, open the sources on each answer and note whether your pages appear. In your server logs, look for the two user agent names and compare the IP addresses with the published lists to confirm the visits are genuine.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Does Perplexity use my content to train AI models?

Perplexity says it does not. Its help centre states that Perplexity does not build foundation models, so your content will not be used for AI model pre-training. Its crawler documentation also says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models, and that Perplexity-User is not used to collect content for training. Both bots exist to find and link pages in answers.

If I block PerplexityBot, will my site disappear from Perplexity?

Not completely. Perplexity's help centre says PerplexityBot will not index the full or partial text of a site that disallows it, but it may still index the domain, headline and a brief factual summary. Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the page. If you want no access at all, you need a server or firewall block as well.