# Perplexity updates PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User crawler documentation, including WAF rules

Published: 2026-10-29T13:01:45.783Z · Source: Perplexity crawlers documentation (https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers)
Source date: 2026-10-29
Flags: spotted via documentation change — change date approximate
Entities: perplexity, cloudflare

Perplexity's crawler documentation page was edited, per the wire's page watcher (change date approximate). The example user-agent strings for PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User are now shorter, dropping the "AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)" tokens, and the published IP-range files are now listed at perplexity.ai instead of perplexity.com.

The firewall (WAF) guidance was rewritten. The Cloudflare example now says to match each bot's user agent against that bot's own IP ranges, and to use a Skip action placed above any custom rules that block or challenge requests. It adds that Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode cannot be skipped by custom rules and may still challenge Perplexity's bots. The AWS WAF steps now pair an IP-set match with a user-agent string match for each bot. The page still says Perplexity-User, which runs when a person's question prompts a page visit, generally ignores robots.txt.

Why it matters: Perplexity's documentation now treats a user-agent match alone as insufficient, so a site that allows its two bots by name without checking each bot's own published IP ranges is following the older guidance.

## What this answers

**What is PerplexityBot's user-agent string?**

Perplexity's crawler documentation now lists PerplexityBot's example user agent as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)", with the version number noted as subject to change. An earlier version of the page showed a longer string that included AppleWebKit and KHTML tokens.

**Where does Perplexity publish its crawler IP ranges?**

The documentation points to https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexitybot.json for PerplexityBot and https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json for Perplexity-User. The earlier version of the page listed the same files under perplexity.com.


Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-10-29-perplexity-updates-perplexitybot-and-perplexity-user-crawler/
From Anything Engine Optimization (AEO Wire) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/ · Standards: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/standards/