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PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's indexing crawler. It reads raw HTML, ignores JavaScript, and respects robots.txt. Here is what it does and why it matters.
What it is
PerplexityBot is the indexing crawler run by Perplexity, the AI search engine. Its job is retrieval, not training: it discovers and indexes pages so Perplexity can pull from them and cite them when it answers a question in real time.
It is distinct from Perplexity-User, the user-initiated agent that fetches a specific page because someone asked Perplexity about it. PerplexityBot does the broad crawling; Perplexity-User handles one-off, on-demand visits.
PerplexityBot respects robots.txt, so you control it with standard crawl directives. If you want to be eligible for Perplexity citations, let it in.
Why it matters
Like most AI crawlers, PerplexityBot reads raw HTML and does not execute JavaScript. Vercel's large-scale study of AI crawler traffic found these bots fetch the server response and never run the client-side code (the rise of the AI crawler).
That has a concrete consequence: content built only on the client, after the page loads, is invisible to it. Your headline, prices, or answer text may render fine for a human and still be absent from what Perplexity indexes.
Server-side rendering or static generation fixes this. See how AI crawlers actually read your site and making JavaScript sites crawlable for the practical steps.
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