Claude-SearchBot vs PerplexityBot

Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot compared on 9 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	Claude-SearchBot	PerplexityBot	Comparison
cites_sources	not_documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	yes	not_documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	search	search	same
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	not_documented	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	Claude-SearchBot statement	PerplexityBot statement
cites_sources	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot.	Perplexity links to the websites that PerplexityBot surfaces in Perplexity search results.
honours_crawl_delay	Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains.	Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Anthropic separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: Claude-SearchBot for search and ClaudeBot for training.	Perplexity does not document a separate training crawler token alongside PerplexityBot.
user_agent_string_full	Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot.	PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).