How to allow PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User on a WordPress site

Published October 13, 2026 · 5 min read

Perplexity is the answer engine that sends the most visible traffic for a lot of small sites, because it links its sources right under the answer. So "why does Perplexity never cite me?" is a question worth an actual check instead of a guess. Here is the check, in order.

Know the two bots

Perplexity documents both in its bot guide:

• PerplexityBot crawls pages for the index. This is the one that decides whether you can be cited at all.
• Perplexity-User fetches a page live when a person's question needs it. Blocking it means Perplexity cannot read your page even when a user points at it directly.

You want both allowed if citations are the goal.

Step 1: robots.txt

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see a blanket Disallow: / under a wildcard or an AI-bot group, that is your problem. The explicit fix:

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

On WordPress, robots.txt is virtual by default. It can be written by your SEO plugin, a security plugin, or a real file in the site root. If you edit one place and nothing changes, another layer owns the file. Change the rule where it actually lives.

Step 2: Cloudflare

This is the gotcha. Cloudflare's bot management and "AI crawl control" features can return 403 to AI crawlers before your server ever sees them, and your robots.txt never gets a say. If you run Cloudflare:

1. Open Security > Bots and check whether Bot Fight Mode is on.
2. Open the AI crawl control page and look at the action for Perplexity specifically.
3. Check Security > Events for recent PerplexityBot blocks.

We have watched people fix robots.txt, wait two weeks, and conclude Perplexity ignores them, while Cloudflare was 403ing every request the whole time. Check the edge first.

Step 3: the security plugin

Wordfence, Solid Security and friends maintain their own bot blocklists. Look for a "block AI crawlers" toggle or a custom rule matching "Perplexity". If you want training blocked but search allowed, make sure the rule names GPTBot-style training bots and not PerplexityBot.

Step 4: verify it worked

Two weeks is a fair wait. Then:

1. Ask Perplexity a question your page answers well and see if you appear.
2. Check your access log for fresh PerplexityBot hits (and reverse-DNS the IPs to confirm they are real).
3. Watch the AI traffic tab if you run AIRankWP, with the usual caveat that user agents can lie.

No citations after a clean month? Then the bottleneck is content, not access: the answer already quotes a page that answers the question better. That is fixable too, just with writing instead of config.

FAQ

Does allowing PerplexityBot put my text in their training data? Perplexity positions itself as an answer engine that cites sources, not a model trainer. If you want the citations, this is the bot to allow.

Can I allow Perplexity but block everyone else? Yes. robots.txt rules are per bot. Allow the two Perplexity agents and disallow whatever else you dislike.

I did all this and still nothing. Now what? Content. Answer the question in your first paragraph, use question headings, cite your sources. Our answer-first writing guide is the next read.