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AI Crawlers

PerplexityBot on Shopify

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What PerplexityBot is and what it does

PerplexityBot is Perplexity's main crawler — it builds the live answer index Perplexity uses to cite sources in its responses. Perplexity-User is the secondary user-agent for on-demand fetches during a Perplexity conversation. Both should be allowed in robots.txt.liquid for any Shopify store that wants Perplexity citation. Blocking either one materially reduces visibility in Perplexity answers.

Perplexity's bot documentation1 names both user-agents and the role of each. The robots.txt.liquid syntax follows the standard pattern documented by Shopify2.

Perplexity-User as the secondary bot

Perplexity-User handles on-demand fetches — when a user references a specific URL in a Perplexity conversation, Perplexity-User fetches the page in real time. It is conceptually similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT-User and Anthropic's Claude-User. Blocking it doesn't stop Perplexity from citing your store from its existing index, but it does stop Perplexity from fetching your live URLs when buyers reference them.

Most stores allow both PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. The argument for blocking either is hard to construct — Perplexity is one of the named Shopify Catalog AI channels and a citation source most stores want to be in.

What blocking either bot costs

Block PerplexityBot → your store gradually disappears from Perplexity's answer index. Citations drop over weeks as the index re-crawls. Block Perplexity-User → Perplexity can still cite your store from the existing index, but can't fetch live pages mid-conversation, which limits its ability to answer questions about your live product page.

The cost is measurable. Track Perplexity citation count weekly using 10-20 category queries. A bot block typically shows up as declining citation count within 30 days.

PerplexityBot audit checklist

Four checks. Quick audit because the answer for most stores is the same: allow both bots, audit only if visibility is dropping.

  1. Open theme code editor. Look for templates/robots.txt.liquid.
  2. Search for 'PerplexityBot' and 'Perplexity-User'. Note any Disallow rules.
  3. If either is blocked, confirm the block was deliberate.
  4. Run 10 category queries weekly in Perplexity; track citation rate.

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