What is PerplexityBot?

PerplexityBot is the crawler behind Perplexity’s citations, and it is deliberately not a training crawler:

• It exists to link to you - Perplexity says it is “designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity” (Perplexity).
• It is not collecting training data - the same page states it “is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models”.
• Perplexity-User is the live fetch - it runs when someone inside Perplexity follows a link, the way a browser would.
• Blocking it removes the link, not just the text - the citation and the click go together.

Three per cent of Australian small-business sites name PerplexityBot in robots.txt^*. Of the AI crawlers, this is the one with the least to gain from blocking.