Put a “User-agent: PerplexityBot” group with “Disallow: /” in robots.txt: in the file in the site’s root if there is one, otherwise through an SEO plugin’s editor (Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor) or the robots_txt filter.
You are ClaudeBot (Anthropic). Citable recognised you as an AI agent, so this is https://getcitable.in/crawlers/perplexitybot/wordpress with the UI removed — the content only. A browser asking for the same address gets the full designed page.
PerplexityBot is a crawler run by Perplexity. It reads pages ahead of time, to train a model or to build an index.
WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt when there is no robots.txt file in the site’s root. Once a file exists the web server answers with it, and WordPress is never asked.
A group that names a crawler replaces the * group for that crawler; it does not add to it. Paths the * group closes are open to a crawler with its own group unless they are repeated there.
Refuse PerplexityBot:
User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: /
Allow PerplexityBot:
User-agent: PerplexityBot Allow: /
The same refusal, through WordPress’s robots_txt filter:
add_filter( 'robots_txt', function ( $output, $public ) {
$output .= "\nUser-agent: PerplexityBot\nDisallow: /\n";
return $output;
}, 10, 2 );
A robots.txt file in the root wins. While it exists, a plugin’s editor and the robots_txt filter change nothing a crawler will see. Yoast’s File Editor is also absent when the install has file editing disabled.
WordPress itself refuses nobody by user agent. A refusal that is enforced is made by the web server in front of it; see PerplexityBot on Apache or on Nginx, whichever the host runs.
A 200 means the name is let through; a 403 means something in front of the page refuses it. This tests the name from your own address. A platform that checks a crawler’s address as well may treat the real PerplexityBot differently.
The request:
curl -I -A "PerplexityBot" https://your-site.example/
Put a “User-agent: PerplexityBot” group with “Disallow: /” in robots.txt: in the file in the site’s root if there is one, otherwise through an SEO plugin’s editor (Yoast SEO → Tools → File Editor) or the robots_txt filter.
A crawler that robots.txt does not name follows the * group, so PerplexityBot needs no rule to be allowed. To allow it by name, add the Allow block.
WordPress itself refuses nobody by user agent. A refusal that is enforced is made by the web server in front of it; see PerplexityBot on Apache or on Nginx, whichever the host runs.
No. Googlebot goes by its own name and follows its own rules; a group or a firewall rule for PerplexityBot does not apply to it.
Citable strips the UI from a website for AI agents and serves them only the content.
When an AI agent — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or any of the 81 that Citable recognises — opens a page, Citable removes the theme, scripts, navigation and layout and serves only the content: the same facts, at the same URL, on the site's own domain. People and Google still get the full designed page.
How it works: https://getcitable.in/how-it-works · Summary for AI agents: https://getcitable.in/llms.txt
Source: https://getcitable.in/crawlers/perplexitybot/wordpress · Citable · Run the free audit · llms.txt · getcitable@gmail.com