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How to rank in Perplexity: 6 checks from Perplexity's own docs

To show up in Perplexity answers, allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and let Perplexity's published IP ranges through your firewall. Perplexity's crawler docs say PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity," and recommend both settings "to ensure your site appears in search results."

No one can promise a citation in Perplexity. These checks remove the reasons it can't use your pages. Type your domain to see where you stand first:

What Perplexity says decides it

Perplexity lists two agents. Each one has its own robots.txt token and its own IP list.

Agent	What Perplexity says it does	robots.txt
PerplexityBot	Crawls to "surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity." "It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models."	Controls it
Perplexity-User	Visits a page when a person asks Perplexity a question, and may "include a link to the page in its response."	Perplexity says it ignores robots.txt rules as a general rule

The docs say each setting works on its own, and changes may take up to 24 hours to apply.

The 6 checks

Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt.
Let Perplexity's IP ranges through your firewall or CDN.
Treat Perplexity-User as a separate agent.
Put your main text in the HTML, not in JavaScript alone.
Give crawlers a sitemap, a meta description, and structured data.
Wait 24 hours and check your server logs.

Step 1: allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. A group that says User-agent: PerplexityBot with Disallow: / tells PerplexityBot not to crawl your site, which goes against Perplexity's advice for sites that want to appear in its results. A blanket User-agent: * with Disallow: / does the same. To allow it in plain terms, give it a group of its own:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

In our scan of 500 software homepages on October 18, 2026, 1 of 467 scored sites blocked PerplexityBot: chatgpt.com. See the PerplexityBot page for the user agent details, and test your file with the AI crawler robots.txt checker.

Step 2: let Perplexity's IP ranges through your firewall

A robots.txt rule does nothing if a firewall blocks the bot first. Perplexity publishes its IP ranges at perplexitybot.json and perplexity-user.json, and says to use them as "the source of truth for your WAF configurations."

For Cloudflare, Perplexity's docs give these steps:

In the Cloudflare dashboard, open Security and pick WAF.
Create a custom rule.
Match User Agent contains PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User, and IP Source Address is in the published ranges.
Set the action to Allow.

For AWS WAF, the docs say to create IP sets from the same lists, add string match conditions for the two user agents, and give the allow rules a higher priority than your block rules. Perplexity says the lists change, so set up a job that fetches them on a schedule.

In our October 18 scan, 20 of 500 homepages showed our checker a bot challenge page in place of the site: 16 from Cloudflare, 2 from Vercel, 1 from Akamai, and 1 we could not name. Our checker is not PerplexityBot, so this does not prove Perplexity was blocked. It shows how common these walls are.

Step 3: treat Perplexity-User as a separate agent

Perplexity-User fetches a page because a person asked about it. Perplexity says this fetcher ignores robots.txt rules as a general rule, so a robots.txt line does not control it the way it controls PerplexityBot. Its IP list is separate, so if your firewall allows PerplexityBot by IP, add the Perplexity-User list to the same rule. The Perplexity-User page has the user agent string.

Step 4: put your main text in the HTML

Perplexity's docs do not say whether PerplexityBot runs JavaScript. The safe choice is to serve your main text, headings, and prices in the HTML. In our scan, 10 of 467 scored homepages had little or no text without JavaScript. To test your own page, view the page source (not the inspector) and search for a sentence from your homepage.

Step 5: give crawlers a map and a summary

Perplexity's crawler docs do not list a sitemap, a meta description, or structured data as requirements. They are the standard ways to help any crawler find your pages and describe them. In our scan, 23 of 467 sites had no sitemap we could find, 10 had no meta description, and 101 (22%) had no JSON-LD. Our schema markup for AI search guide covers what to add.

Step 6: wait and check your logs

Perplexity says changes can take "up to 24 hours." After a day, search your server or CDN logs for PerplexityBot. Its full user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)

Anyone can fake a user agent. Perplexity's own advice is to combine "User-Agent string matching and IP address verification," so match the IP against perplexitybot.json. If the bot gets a 200 response from your pages, the access side is done. What Perplexity picks to cite after that depends on its own systems, which its crawler docs do not describe.

What Perplexity's docs don't cover

The crawler docs do not describe ranking factors, a way to submit pages, or llms.txt. Tools that sell "Perplexity SEO" can't point to an official list beyond the access rules above. If you want an llms.txt file for other AI tools, see our llms.txt example.

The other AI answer engines

Each AI company runs its own bots, and each one has separate rules:

How to show up in ChatGPT search: OAI-SearchBot and OpenAI's IP ranges.
How to rank in Gemini: the Google Search index and Google-Extended.
How to get cited by Claude: Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, and ClaudeBot.
How to rank in AI Overviews: what Google says about its Search features.
AI crawlers in robots.txt: rules for every major AI bot in one file.

Check your site

Run the free check on your domain. It tests PerplexityBot and seven other AI user agents in robots.txt, text without JavaScript, JSON-LD, sitemap, meta description, and llms.txt, and tells you when a challenge page blocks it. The $19 deep report crawls 25 pages and lists fixes in order.

FAQ

How do I get my website to show up in Perplexity? Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt and let Perplexity's published IP ranges through your firewall. Perplexity recommends both settings to make sure your site appears in its search results.

Does Perplexity use my site to train AI models? Perplexity says PerplexityBot "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." It says the same of Perplexity-User.

Does Perplexity-User follow robots.txt? Perplexity says Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules as a general rule, because a person asked for the page.

How long does a robots.txt change take to work in Perplexity? Perplexity says up to 24 hours.

Does Perplexity read llms.txt? Perplexity's crawler docs do not mention llms.txt.

Checked 2026-10-23. Prices and policies change. Confirm on the source before you buy.

Sources

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