PerplexityBot is the web crawler operated by Perplexity AI, an AI-powered answer engine founded in 2022, that retrieves live web content to ground the answers generated by Perplexity’s search product. Unlike training crawlers such as GPTBot or CCBot, PerplexityBot is primarily an inference-time retrieval crawler: it fetches pages in real time when a user asks a question, so that the model’s answer is based on current rather than training-cutoff information. Because Perplexity cites its sources inline, being crawled and indexed by PerplexityBot can result in direct citation attribution and referral traffic when users click through to the source. Webmasters can identify PerplexityBot by its user-agent string and can block it via robots.txt, though doing so will reduce the likelihood of being cited in Perplexity answers. In 2024, Perplexity faced criticism from several publishers who alleged that its crawler was ignoring robots.txt disallow rules, prompting the company to update its crawling policies.