Technical eligibility, control 15 of 20
T-15 Distinguish PerplexityBot from Perplexity-User
PerplexityBot is a search crawler; Perplexity-User supports user fetches and generally ignores robots.txt. Neither should be treated as a foundation-model training switch.
- Priority
- High priority.
- Hard gate
- No
- Change class
- APPROVAL_REQUIRED: Required exact authority must be valid before the consequential action.
- Quality bucket
- Technical eligibility
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.
Evidence to review
- Bot-specific rules, verified request samples and public/private path tests.
How to implement
- Record search-crawler and user-fetch access separately.
- Use current published identity data for narrow edge exceptions.
- Test public retrieval while retaining normal authentication for private content.
- Review vendor policy text against actual logs and keep discrepancies explicit.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Automated. A check in the scan sets PASS or FAIL for this control, and reports UNKNOWN or BLOCKED when its input is missing.
The check looks at: 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 v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.