Technical eligibility · Branch T.D, Platform crawlers and AI eligibility
T-15 PerplexityBot access must be managed deliberately
If Perplexity visibility is wanted, PerplexityBot must be able to reach public content at both the robots.txt and edge layers.
- Scope
- Perplexity
- Priority
- High priority.
- Quality bucket
- Technical eligibility
- Legacy coverage
- GEO-07
Why it matters
A crawler can be blocked by robots.txt or by a WAF or CDN rule without anyone on the team noticing. If PerplexityBot cannot reach your pages, Perplexity has nothing to read, so users looking for answers there will not see your content. Managing access on purpose means the outcome reflects a decision, not an accident.
How to implement
- Open robots.txt and confirm PerplexityBot is allowed on the public content you want found.
- Test your WAF and CDN bot settings to confirm PerplexityBot is not challenged or blocked.
- Review your logs for critical pages and watch the 200 and 304 responses against any 403 and 429 responses.
- Fix any rule that blocks the crawler where you want visibility.
- If you do not want Perplexity visibility, write that decision down.
Checklist
- Check the PerplexityBot policy in robots.txt.
- Test the WAF and CDN bot policy.
- Monitor the 200 and 304 rates and any 403 and 429 responses on critical content.
- If search visibility is not wanted, document that choice deliberately.
How to audit
- Review robots.txt and edge logs.
- Collect examples of the Perplexity crawler user-agent.
How UltimateSEO checks this automatically
Automated. Checked automatically: robots.txt groups for PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User are evaluated separately with the effective group rules.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.1, revised 2026-10-07. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.