AIRankWPHow to allow PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User on a WordPress site
Short answer: allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt if you want your pages to be able to appear in Perplexity search results. Perplexity-User is a separate agent that fetches a page when a person asks about it, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt. If a firewall blocks either one, robots.txt will not fix it.
The two user agents
Perplexity's crawler documentation lists two. PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity search results, and Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User supports user actions: when someone asks a question, Perplexity may visit a page to answer it. Because a user requested that fetch, Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.
Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
In WordPress, robots.txt is usually generated by WordPress or by an SEO plugin. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt to see what is live, then change it in the plugin's file editor or upload a real robots.txt to the site root. Check that no other group in the file blocks the same agent.
Check your firewall
Perplexity says that if you use a web application firewall you may need to explicitly allow its bots. For Cloudflare, its documented approach is a custom rule in Security, WAF that matches the user agent contains PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User and the source IP is in the ranges Perplexity publishes, with the action set to Allow. Perplexity publishes the IP lists at perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json and perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json.
Match the IP ranges as well as the user agent. Anyone can send a request that claims to be a given bot, so the user agent alone is not proof.
Allowing it does not guarantee anything
Allowing a crawler lets it see your pages. It does not promise your page will be shown or cited. What gets quoted still depends on whether the page answers the question clearly.
Sources
Related
- robots.txt for AI crawlers: what to allow and what to block
- How to check which AI crawlers visit your WordPress site
Names belong to their owners. This post is general information, not legal advice. Checked against the sources above on October 13, 2026; vendor documents change, so recheck before relying on them.