The crawler question for Perplexity is PerplexityBot. Blocking is a real option with a real cost, and the two directions are not symmetric. Perplexity retrieves live for almost every query and shows its sources inline as numbered citations. That makes it the most transparent of the six to audit: you can read exactly which URLs it used, which is why it is usually the first engine worth working on.
How Perplexity actually decides
Perplexity retrieves live for almost every query and shows its sources inline as numbered citations. That makes it the most transparent of the six to audit: you can read exactly which URLs it used, which is why it is usually the first engine worth working on.
Its citations skew toward community and discussion sources: published analyses put Reddit at roughly 46.7% of its top citations. In practice that means the surfaces worth auditing first are Reddit, forum threads and community Q&A, recent blog posts, documentation.
The method, in order
Know which agent does what: PerplexityBot. Training access and answer-time retrieval are usually separate controls, and blocking the wrong one achieves the opposite of what was intended.
Decide what you are protecting. Blocking reduces the chance of being quoted without attribution; it also reduces the chance of being recommended at all.
Consider the asymmetry. Being absent from Perplexity is easy to cause and slow to undo, even here, where retrieval is live, reputation lags access.
If you do block, block deliberately and document it, so a future traffic investigation does not spend a week rediscovering it.
Re-check after any robots.txt change that the agent you meant to allow is still allowed.
The honest caveat
A brand with no presence in community discussion is very hard to surface here, however good its own site is. This is the engine where owned content alone reliably fails.
Cituna checks Perplexity daily alongside the other five engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, on the $39 Starter, and pairs the result with Google Search Console so a change here can be tied to real clicks. We do not track Microsoft Copilot.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.