Is this really PerplexityBot?
Paste an address from your logs and the User-Agent it sent. This checks the claim against the address list Perplexity AI publishes, and tells you whether the request really came from them.
PerplexityBot indexes content that appears in Perplexity answers. Reports of traffic forging its user agent have made verifying it worth doing rather than assuming.
No account, and nothing is stored against you. We look the address up, we do not log who asked.
What the three answers mean
Verified
The address is inside the list Perplexity AI publishes for PerplexityBot, or it reverse resolves into their own zone and that hostname resolves back to the same address. This is a positive result, not an absence of evidence.
Forged
Perplexity AI publishes the complete list of addresses PerplexityBot crawls from, and this address is not in it. Something sent you the name without the infrastructure behind it.
Cannot tell
We hold no authoritative answer for this one, so we say so rather than guessing. A missing reverse DNS record is suspicious and it is not proof, and a checker that turns "I do not know" into "forged" is worse than useless: it is confidently wrong.
How Perplexity AI says to verify PerplexityBot
Perplexity publishes the address ranges PerplexityBot crawls from as a JSON file.
We refresh our copy of that list every twelve hours. If ours goes stale, this tool returns "cannot tell" and says so, rather than condemning a crawler that added addresses since we last looked. Read the source: Perplexity AI's documentation.
Questions
How do I verify PerplexityBot?
Compare the address against the range list Perplexity publishes. A request carrying the PerplexityBot user agent from an address outside those ranges is not Perplexity, whatever it claims.
Why does PerplexityBot get forged so often?
Sites that want to appear in AI answers tend to allow AI search crawlers deliberately, so the identity buys access in exactly the way a Googlebot claim does. The user agent costs nothing to copy; the address range cannot be.
One address is not the question
You came here with a log line. If something is forging PerplexityBot against your site, it is not doing it once, and checking them one at a time is not a plan. WebDecoy watches every request that claims a crawler identity, verifies each one the way this page just did, and links the ones that come back to the same actor even when the addresses keep changing.
See what is claiming to be a crawler on your site