Guide
How to get cited by Perplexity
What Perplexity publishes: allow PerplexityBot and its IP ranges if you want the site in search results. Perplexity-User is a separate, user-triggered fetch.
13 October 2026 · CiteScore Team · 10 min read
Perplexity’s public documentation for publishers is a crawler page, not a ranking formula. It names two user agents, says they are independent, and tells you how to let them through a firewall. Perplexity does not publish a citation rate or a schema requirement on that page. CiteScore does not log into Perplexity. The claims below are from Perplexity’s crawler documentation.
The matching pages for the other two engines are how to get cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews optimization.
Two tokens
| Token | What Perplexity says it does |
|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | Surfaces and links websites in search results on Perplexity. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. To have the site appear in search results, Perplexity recommends allowing this token in robots.txt and permitting requests from the published IP ranges. |
| Perplexity-User | Supports a user action. When someone asks Perplexity a question, it might visit a page to answer and include a link to that page. It is not used for automatic web crawling, and it is not used to collect content for training foundation models. Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt, because a user requested the fetch. The IP list is perplexity-user.json. |
Perplexity says each setting works independently, and that a change can take up to 24 hours to show up in their systems. The full user-agent strings on the doc:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
Allow the search crawler
This is the group Perplexity asks for when you want the site eligible to be surfaced in search results. Merge it into the file you already have. A token with no group of its own follows User-agent: *, so a blanket Disallow: / under * covers PerplexityBot until you give it a group.
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
Robots.txt is the file. The firewall is the other gate. Perplexity says a WAF may need an explicit allow, and that the safe rule combines the user-agent with the current IP ranges. For Cloudflare, the doc describes a custom WAF rule: user-agent contains PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User, and the source IP is in the official ranges, with the action set to Allow. For AWS WAF, it describes an IP set plus a user-agent string match, allowed at a higher priority than blocking rules. The ranges come from perplexitybot.json and perplexity-user.json. Perplexity says those addresses change and should be fetched again, not pasted once and forgotten.
The same page says Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt. A Disallow under Perplexity-User is not the control Perplexity documents for user-triggered fetches. The control they do document for those fetches is which hosts the fetcher can reach, including through the WAF rule above. The robots.txt guide covers how this token sits next to GPTBot and Google-Extended. What the $39 report infers about Perplexity, without a Perplexity login, is on Perplexity citations.
What the crawler page leaves out
Perplexity’s crawler page does not list a schema type, an llms.txt file, or a content template as the way into a footnote. This page does not add one. A page the crawler cannot fetch cannot be linked from a crawl of that page. Put the product name and the fact you want quoted in the HTML. That is a property of a fetch, and Perplexity does not publish it as a score.
The cross-engine list for a product site is the AI search readiness checklist for SaaS.
Free check, the $39 audit, and the template pack
Run the free check first. It reports whether robots.txt allows or blocks PerplexityBot, along with GPTBot and Google-Extended. It does not read Perplexity-User, and it does not check your WAF against Perplexity’s IP list. A passing PerplexityBot row means the robots group is not a disallow. It is not a live Perplexity answer.
The $39 GEO audit is one public URL, a 0–100 CiteScore, and about ten prioritized fixes, as a PDF. The score comes from on-page signals — definitions, entities, evidence, schema, freshness, crawler access — and, when a language-model key is configured, a review of the HTML we fetched. We do not log into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews. The per-engine snapshot is an inference, and the report says so.
The GEO Content Template Pack ($19) is a separate $19 purchase from the check and the audit.
Source
- Perplexity Crawlers. Both user agents, the up-to-24-hour note, the user-agent strings, the IP lists, and the Cloudflare and AWS WAF guidance.