AI search fix
PerplexityBot blocked — how to fix it
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler for pages used in AI answers and citations. Blocks in robots.txt or at the CDN edge leave your content unavailable to Perplexity even when Google indexes it normally. Add an explicit PerplexityBot section with Allow paths you intend to share, mirror that policy in Cloudflare or your WAF, and confirm production logs show 200 responses rather than 403 or challenge pages.
Search live /robots.txt for `User-agent: PerplexityBot` with Disallow rules, or a global disallow that catches every bot. Then inspect Bot Fight Mode, managed WAF rules and security plugins that treat automation as hostile. Use the same allow pattern you apply to GPTBot so policy stays consistent across the AI platforms you trust.
Restore PerplexityBot access
- Fetch production /robots.txt and note any PerplexityBot or site-wide disallow lines.
- Add or update a PerplexityBot section with explicit Allow paths for public pages.
- In Cloudflare WAF, create an allow or skip rule when User-Agent contains PerplexityBot.
- Deploy and verify with server logs or a test request using the PerplexityBot string.
- Monitor for 24 hours to confirm repeated successful responses on key URLs.
You'll receive an HTML report on whether PerplexityBot is allowed in robots.txt and at your edge firewall.
Run the diagnosticRelated questions
- Cloudflare blocking several AI crawlers at onceBroader WAF pattern when more than PerplexityBot fails.
- robots.txt blocking multiple AI user agentsFix the policy file before tuning edge rules alone.
- Site not appearing in Perplexity — wider checklistTechnical access plus content signals beyond the crawler block.
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