Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges PerplexityBot uses. A request with this user agent from any other address is not PerplexityBot. The zoo checks every visit against that list. Read Perplexity's documentation.
How to block PerplexityBot
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from PerplexityBot's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block PerplexityBot from the whole site User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Requests that use PerplexityBot's name but fail Perplexity's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Questions site owners ask
Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking PerplexityBot hurt my search rankings?
Not in Google or Bing. It may stop your pages appearing in Perplexity answers.
How often does PerplexityBot visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.