Which sites block PerplexityBot?

Perplexity · declared purpose: search / answer indexing · latest sealed date 2026-08-07.

On 2026-08-07, 4,608 of the 61,552 panel domains that served a parseable robots.txt name perplexitybot explicitly. 2,360 of them (3.8% of parsed) disallow it from the entire site, 926 restrict it to part of the site, and 1,322 name it and allow it. The remaining 56,944 parsed domains do not mention it at all — their wildcard group governs it.

What the denominator is. On 2026-08-07 we attempted /robots.txt on 100,000 panel domains. 24,130 could not be reached at all (DNS failure, TLS failure, timeout, refused connection) and 14,318 answered with something other than a 200. Both of those groups have no observed AI-crawler policy, and neither is counted as allowing anything — an unreachable site is UNKNOWN, not permissive. Every crawler figure below is out of the 61,552 domains that returned a robots.txt we could parse on that date.

Blocks outright — the file has a group for that exact product token containing Disallow: / with no overriding allow. Partly restricts — a group exists with at least one non-empty Disallow, but not the whole site. Names & allows — a group exists with no effective Disallow. Everything else is not mentioned: the wildcard * group governs it, and wildcard effects are counted separately rather than folded in, because a site that blocks everything has not made a decision about any AI crawler in particular. Matching is exact and case-insensitive per RFC 9309 — never substring.

Get told when PerplexityBot change their AI crawler rules

Sites publish today's robots.txt and overwrite it — no archive, no history, no notification. We keep a dated daily copy. Leave your email and we'll send you what moved for PerplexityBot: who started blocking, who stopped, and on which day.

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What moved: PerplexityBot verdict changes

Counted domains whose robots.txt changed what PerplexityBot may do, between one sealed date and the previous one. Aggregate only — we do not publish which site.

Across the whole archive: 1,414 PerplexityBot verdict transitions, of which 267 moved TO a full block and 294 moved AWAY from one.

Sealed date	Verdict moved	Domains
2026-08-07	not mentioned → named and allowed	11
2026-08-07	not mentioned → partly restricted	7
2026-08-07	blocked outright → not mentioned	5
2026-08-07	not mentioned → blocked outright	3
2026-08-07	partly restricted → not mentioned	3
2026-08-07	named and allowed → partly restricted	3
2026-08-07	blocked outright → partly restricted	2
2026-08-07	named and allowed → not mentioned	2
2026-08-07	partly restricted → named and allowed	1
2026-08-06	not mentioned → named and allowed	14
2026-08-06	not mentioned → blocked outright	4
2026-08-06	named and allowed → not mentioned	4
2026-08-06	not mentioned → partly restricted	2
2026-08-06	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-08-06	partly restricted → not mentioned	1
2026-08-06	named and allowed → partly restricted	1
2026-08-05	not mentioned → named and allowed	5
2026-08-05	named and allowed → partly restricted	4
2026-08-05	not mentioned → partly restricted	3
2026-08-05	blocked outright → not mentioned	3
2026-08-05	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-08-05	named and allowed → not mentioned	2
2026-08-05	partly restricted → not mentioned	1
2026-08-05	named and allowed → blocked outright	1
2026-08-04	not mentioned → partly restricted	13
2026-08-04	not mentioned → named and allowed	9
2026-08-04	not mentioned → blocked outright	2
2026-08-04	partly restricted → not mentioned	2
2026-08-04	blocked outright → not mentioned	2
2026-08-04	named and allowed → not mentioned	2
2026-08-04	named and allowed → partly restricted	2
2026-08-04	partly restricted → named and allowed	1
2026-08-04	blocked outright → partly restricted	1
2026-08-03	not mentioned → named and allowed	5
2026-08-03	partly restricted → not mentioned	4
2026-08-03	named and allowed → not mentioned	4
2026-08-03	blocked outright → partly restricted	3
2026-08-03	not mentioned → partly restricted	1
2026-08-03	blocked outright → not mentioned	1
2026-08-02	not mentioned → named and allowed	3

Read this before quoting a trend. We hold 55 sealed daily snapshots between 2026-06-09 and 2026-08-07, out of 60 calendar days. 5 calendar day(s) inside that span have no collection run at all: 2026-06-11, 2026-06-12, 2026-06-19, 2026-07-04, 2026-07-15. Consecutive rows in every table below are consecutive SEALED dates, not consecutive days — where a gap falls, that row's diff covers more than 24 hours, and the span is printed with it. We do not interpolate across a day we did not collect.

Every sealed date

The denominator column is the number of panel domains that served a parseable robots.txt that day. It moves, so a raw count moves with it — compare the ratio, not the count.

Sealed date	Names it	Blocks outright	Partly restricts	Names & allows	Parsed that day
2026-08-07	4,608	2,360	926	1,322	61,552
2026-08-06	4,598	2,367	915	1,316	61,421
2026-08-05	4,601	2,379	915	1,307	61,527
2026-08-04	4,596	2,382	905	1,309	61,620
2026-08-03	4,590	2,383	900	1,307	61,533
2026-08-02	4,583	2,385	900	1,298	61,559
2026-08-01	4,565	2,388	891	1,286	61,326
2026-07-31	4,594	2,401	890	1,303	61,595
2026-07-30	4,566	2,413	864	1,289	61,444
2026-07-29	4,550	2,407	855	1,288	61,492
2026-07-28	4,541	2,409	848	1,284	61,562
2026-07-27	4,531	2,406	844	1,281	61,440
2026-07-26	4,528	2,401	842	1,285	61,573
2026-07-25	4,532	2,408	844	1,280	61,584
2026-07-24	4,525	2,404	840	1,281	61,576
2026-07-23	4,531	2,413	838	1,280	61,758
2026-07-22	4,540	2,419	835	1,286	61,744
2026-07-21	4,512	2,418	824	1,270	61,565
2026-07-20	4,515	2,420	822	1,273	61,665
2026-07-19	4,501	2,425	813	1,263	61,451
2026-07-18	4,521	2,429	824	1,268	61,782
2026-07-17	4,497	2,431	815	1,251	61,659
2026-07-16	4,477	2,427	806	1,244	61,526
2026-07-14	4,453	2,423	791	1,239	61,542
2026-07-13	4,441	2,423	788	1,230	61,448
2026-07-12	4,447	2,427	784	1,236	61,518
2026-07-11	4,444	2,426	784	1,234	61,526
2026-07-10	4,443	2,430	782	1,231	61,425
2026-07-09	4,435	2,430	780	1,225	61,495
2026-07-08	4,409	2,420	779	1,210	61,364
2026-07-07	4,409	2,423	772	1,214	61,491
2026-07-06	4,400	2,420	768	1,212	61,455
2026-07-05	4,399	2,422	764	1,213	61,562
2026-07-03	4,399	2,426	760	1,213	61,535
2026-07-02	4,389	2,420	759	1,210	61,553
2026-07-01	4,383	2,430	754	1,199	61,599
2026-06-30	4,382	2,436	751	1,195	61,590
2026-06-29	4,370	2,424	753	1,193	61,814
2026-06-28	4,355	2,426	747	1,182	61,835
2026-06-27	4,357	2,427	744	1,186	61,848
2026-06-26	4,363	2,433	744	1,186	61,851
2026-06-25	4,332	2,420	745	1,167	61,867
2026-06-24	4,253	2,364	732	1,157	61,660
2026-06-23	4,264	2,377	728	1,159	61,877
2026-06-22	4,258	2,368	728	1,162	61,911
2026-06-21	4,252	2,362	724	1,166	61,905
2026-06-20	4,241	2,359	722	1,160	61,754
2026-06-18	4,221	2,362	708	1,151	61,805
2026-06-17	4,285	2,433	704	1,148	61,952
2026-06-16	4,257	2,428	694	1,135	61,645
2026-06-15	4,252	2,433	696	1,123	61,715
2026-06-14	4,259	2,432	698	1,129	61,697
2026-06-13	4,253	2,428	697	1,128	61,648
2026-06-10	4,220	2,422	687	1,111	61,489
2026-06-09	4,217	2,422	687	1,108	61,599

Why you will not find a robots.txt file here. These pages render mechanical verdicts and aggregate diffs, never a fetched body. Site operators leave contact addresses in robots.txt comments — on the 2026-08-06 snapshot 2,200 of the distinct bodies we fetched contain an email-shaped string — and republishing bodies would republish those. Nothing on this surface identifies an individual site, either: every figure is a count.

Compiled from each site's own published /robots.txt, /ai.txt, /llms.txt and /.well-known/tdmrep.json, fetched daily over a frozen 100,000-domain research panel (source list: Tranco; no Tranco rank is republished here). Verdicts are mechanical readings of what those files say under RFC 9309 grouping with exact product-token matching — they are not legal advice, not a statement about any site's intentions, and not a claim about what any crawler actually did. A robots.txt is a request, not an access control. Figures are provided for informational purposes only and carry no warranty of accuracy or completeness.

AI crawler policy home · What changed · How this is collected · US Tech Automations.