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AI SEO Glossary
TL;DR — PerplexityBot is Perplexity's web crawler — used for indexing and source discovery. Perplexity also runs Perplexity-User as a live-retrieval agent that fetches sources at answer time. Allowing both is required for full citation visibility.
PerplexityBotis Perplexity's crawler, used for indexing and source-discovery work. Perplexity also operates a live-retrieval user-agent (Perplexity-User on some traffic patterns) that fetches sources at the moment a user's prompt requires them. Perplexity's citation pattern is unusually transparent: every answer ships with numbered citations linked to source URLs, which makes Perplexity one of the easiest engines to measure citation share against.
Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt. Verify hits in server logs by user-agent string. Full Perplexity-specific work — including the Buy with Pro shopping surface and Pages publishing — on /perplexity-ai-seo-services.
Robots.txt, server logs, and CDN bot dashboards. Because Perplexity's citation surface is so explicit (numbered, linked, in a sidebar), it's typically the first engine an AEO/GEO program reports on — clean week-over-week diffs without prompt-pattern inference noise.
For eCommerce brands, Perplexity Pro's Buy with Pro integrates a shopping carousel into the chat surface for eligible products. For research-led B2B brands, Perplexity Pages give brand mentions a second life as referenceable, URL-addressable summary pages.
The string includes PerplexityBot as the identifier. Perplexity also operates a live-retrieval agent typically logged as Perplexity-User. Both should be verified in your access logs.
Every Perplexity answer ships with numbered citations linked to source URLs in a sidebar. That makes Perplexity one of the cleanest engines for citation-share measurement — no inference required, you can count the cites directly per prompt.
Yes, for nearly every brand. Perplexity is the most citation-transparent of the major answer engines and the most likely to drive measurable referral traffic. Disallowing it forfeits both the citation visibility and the click-through traffic.
Yes — Buy with Pro is Perplexity's in-chat shopping experience, launched in 2024 for Perplexity Pro subscribers. Products surfaced via the merchant program; eligibility and feed work scoped on /perplexity-shopping-optimization.
Pages is Perplexity's publishing surface where users can save AI-generated answers as shareable URL-addressable pages. Brand mentions inside well-distributed Pages can drive secondary citation surface as those Pages get re-cited by Perplexity itself.
Filter server access logs by user-agent string. Match against the canonical UAs published in Perplexity's crawler documentation. CDN dashboards (Cloudflare, Fastly) typically also surface PerplexityBot as a separately-tracked bot.
Perplexity is the most measurable of the AI answer engines. Let us show you where you stand. 888-982-8269.