Googlebot vs PerplexityBot

Googlebot and PerplexityBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	Googlebot	PerplexityBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
honours_crawl_delay	no	not_documented	different
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	0.991	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	search	search	same
reads_llms_txt	no	not_documented	different
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Googlebot statement	PerplexityBot statement
honours_crawl_delay	Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot.	Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
observed_verified_request_ratio_census	Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z.	not documented
reads_llms_txt	Google Search does not use llms.txt files.	Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot reads llms.txt files.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended token.	Perplexity does not document a separate training crawler token alongside PerplexityBot.
user_agent_string_full	Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).	PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).
verifiable_by_rdns	Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com.	Perplexity does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for PerplexityBot.