OAI-SearchBot vs PerplexityBot

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

Field	OAI-SearchBot	PerplexityBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	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	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot	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	OAI-SearchBot statement	PerplexityBot statement
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt.	not documented
separate_search_and_training_tokens	OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training.	Perplexity does not document a separate training crawler token alongside PerplexityBot.
user_agent_string_full	OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot.	PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).