PerplexityBot
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as search indexing. It builds the index answers cite. It is not Perplexity-User and not a person on perplexity.ai.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Motif family
- perplexity
- Motif class
- Search indexing
- In Motif classifier
- Yes
- robots.txt
- Vendor documents that it honors robots.txt
- Executes JavaScript
- No
- Verified in Motif
- Perplexity publishes crawler docs. Motif does not check source IPs
What Motif will and will not claim
Motif classifies PerplexityBot as family perplexity, class search, on tracker or collector hits. HTML-only indexing is out of scope.
Revenue
A later human click from perplexity.ai is first-touch Perplexity. The indexer is not that channel.
Vendor documentation
Start with the vendor page at https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots. Motif stores the controlled token from a self-reported User-Agent.
PerplexityBot User-Agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Block PerplexityBot in robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /Does PerplexityBot count as a visit in Motif?
No. If PerplexityBot hits the Motif tracker or collector it increments AI crawlers. It does not create a visitor and cannot win a recommendation.
Will Motif show PerplexityBot on my HTML pages?
Only if that client requested /m.js or POST /v1/events. HTML-only crawls of the origin never reach Motif. Saying otherwise would be a product lie.
Should I block PerplexityBot?
Search-index bots are how some assistants find pages to cite. Blocking them is a discovery policy, not a ranking in Motif. User-requested fetchers and model crawlers are separate decisions.