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PerplexityBot tracking
PerplexityBot: the crawler behind Perplexity's citations
Perplexity cites its sources in nearly every answer, and PerplexityBot is how it finds them. WriteWorks identifies every PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User request to your site, ranks the pages they read, and shows them beside whether Perplexity actually cites you.
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Claude and MCP clients The challenge
Why PerplexityBot matters and why it is hidden
Perplexity cites what it can reach, and its crawler is invisible to standard analytics.
Perplexity rewards pages it can reach
Perplexity answers lean on the sources it can fetch and index. If PerplexityBot rarely visits a page, that page has little chance of appearing as a numbered source.
Crawler hits hide in server logs
PerplexityBot does not execute analytics tags, so its visits never reach GA4. Finding them means exporting and filtering raw logs, page by page.
No line from crawl to citation
Even when you know PerplexityBot visited, you cannot tell whether the visit led anywhere without checking Perplexity's answers for your brand as well.
Fixes go unverified
Content ships and the task closes, but nobody re-checks whether the answer itself actually changed.
The solution
How WriteWorks tracks PerplexityBot
Identify, rank, then compare with Perplexity citations.
WriteWorks resolves both to Perplexity and classifies them separately: PerplexityBot as AI Indexing, because it builds the index Perplexity searches, and Perplexity-User as AI Citation, because it fetches a page while a person's question is being answered.
The Pages view shows which URLs PerplexityBot fetched and how often, with a per-page breakdown by intent and the time of the last visit.
WriteWorks tracks Perplexity answers for your prompts too. Bot signals list pages PerplexityBot crawled in the last 7 days that Perplexity has not cited yet, ready for you to strengthen.
Customer story
How teams are winning AI search
From invisibility to category dominance across every major answer engine.
“WriteWorks showed us exactly which competitors AI was recommending instead of us, and the sentiment behind every mention. We closed the gap across every major engine.”
RN
Capabilities
PerplexityBot capabilities
Crawl data built around Perplexity's citation model.
PerplexityBot visit trend
Daily requests with comparison against the previous period.
Top pages for Perplexity
The URLs Perplexity's crawler fetches most.
Perplexity-User fetches
Live, user-initiated fetches counted as citation intent.
Live request stream
Watch Perplexity's requests arrive, refreshed every 15 seconds.
Perplexity-referred visitors
People who clicked through from a Perplexity answer, with the browser snippet.
Crawled-but-not-cited list
Pages Perplexity reads but has not yet used as a source.
Time savings
What changes
From log exports to a Perplexity-specific view.
TaskBeforeWith WriteWorksTime saved
Confirm PerplexityBot reaches key pagesExport and grep logsPer-page PerplexityBot countsNo log work
Find pages Perplexity reads but ignoresManual cross-check of answersBot signals watch listAutomatic
Included
What's included
The Perplexity view inside AI crawler intelligence.
PerplexityBot (indexing) and Perplexity-User (citation) identified
Perplexity broken out on the platform view
Per-page activity with last-visit time
Live crawler log with CSV export
Crawled-but-not-cited watch list for Perplexity
Visitors referred by Perplexity answers
Built for
Who uses it
Teams that want to be a Perplexity source.
Brands targeting Perplexity
Measure the crawl side of your Perplexity visibility.
Research and B2B publishers
See which reference pages Perplexity fetches as candidate sources.
SEO and AEO specialists
Debug a missing citation by checking the crawl first.
Featured story
GoTeachingJobs
“We retired three legacy tools and rebuilt our launch motion around WriteWorks. We can finally see our share of voice on the engines our buyers ask, and prove the lift on every run.”
Read the full story10+
AI platforms measured
Share of voice
Tracked vs competitors
Proven
Lift on every run
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Everything teams typically ask before getting started.
What is PerplexityBot?+
PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to find and index web pages so they can be surfaced and linked in Perplexity's answers. Perplexity says it is not used to train foundation models. It identifies itself with "PerplexityBot" in the user-agent string.
How can I tell if PerplexityBot is crawling my site?+
Its visits only appear in server-side logs. Connect a source in WriteWorks, such as a Cloudflare Worker, a Vercel log drain or the WordPress plugin, and PerplexityBot requests are identified and listed by page automatically.
Does PerplexityBot crawling lead to Perplexity citations?+
It is a precondition, not a guarantee. A page Perplexity cannot reach cannot be cited. WriteWorks lists pages PerplexityBot crawled recently that Perplexity has not cited yet, which is usually where content work pays off.
What is Perplexity-User?+
Perplexity-User is the agent Perplexity uses when a person's question leads it to visit a page directly. WriteWorks tracks it separately from PerplexityBot and classifies it as AI Citation, since the fetch happens while an answer is being written.
Which plans include PerplexityBot tracking?+
AI crawler analytics is on the Growth and Enterprise plans and on agency plans, not on Starter.
Explore more
Keep exploring
Related solutions, adjacent use cases, and platform features.
See what PerplexityBot reads
Identify Perplexity's crawler, rank the pages it fetches, and find the ones it reads but does not cite.