Perplexity User Agents

Understanding how Perplexity AI accesses and indexes web content

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Introduction to Perplexity User Agents

Perplexity AI is a search engine and AI assistant that crawls the web to provide up-to-date information. Understanding Perplexity's user agents is important for website owners who want to optimize their content for Perplexity or control how their content is accessed.

Perplexity User Agent Identification

Perplexity identifies itself with specific user agents when crawling web content. Here are the known Perplexity user agents:

Main Perplexity User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://www.perplexity.ai/bot)

This is the primary user agent used by Perplexity when crawling websites.

Perplexity AI Assistant User Agent

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

This user agent is used when Perplexity's AI assistant is browsing the web in response to user queries.

How Perplexity Accesses Web Content

Perplexity accesses web content in several ways:

  • Regular web crawling - For building and updating its search index
  • Real-time browsing - When users ask questions that require current information
  • Content verification - To verify information and provide sources for answers

Controlling Perplexity's Access to Your Content

Website owners can control how Perplexity accesses their content through:

Robots.txt Configuration

You can use the following directives in your robots.txt file:

# Block all Perplexity access
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /

# Block Perplexity from specific sections
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members-only/

Optimizing Content for Perplexity

To ensure your content performs well when accessed by Perplexity:

  • Use clear, factual information with proper citations
  • Structure content with appropriate headings and semantic HTML
  • Include comprehensive information that directly answers common questions
  • Keep content up-to-date, as Perplexity prioritizes recent information
  • Use schema markup to provide additional context about your content

Tracking Perplexity Visits

With xseek, you can track when and how Perplexity accesses your content:

  • Monitor Perplexity user agent visits in your analytics dashboard
  • Track which content Perplexity is accessing most frequently
  • Analyze how your content appears in Perplexity search results
  • Measure traffic referred from Perplexity to your website

Related User Agents

Learn about other AI user agents to better manage your website's interaction with AI systems:

Track AI Bots on Your Website

Start monitoring AI user agents and optimize your content for better AI visibility with xseek.