Rattlesnakes By Mail

GPTBot vs PerplexityBot

GPTBot and PerplexityBot compared on 10 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

How many of the compared fields have the same answer for both crawlers, and how many differ.

GPTBot and PerplexityBot, fields comparedGPTBot and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 6 fields, out of 10 fields in total.Same: 4 fieldsSame4Different: 6 fieldsDifferent6
GPTBot and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 6 fields, out of 10 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldGPTBotPerplexityBotComparison
cites_sourcesnot documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delaynot_documentednot_documentedsame
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedtrainingsearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot documentednot_documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
robots_txt_fetch_markeryesnot documenteddifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensyesnot_documenteddifferent
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)different
verifiable_by_rdnsnot_documentednot_documentedsame

Differences

FieldGPTBot statementPerplexityBot statement
cites_sourcesnot documentedPerplexity links to the websites that PerplexityBot surfaces in Perplexity search results.
purpose_documentedGPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
reads_llms_txtnot documentedPerplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot reads llms.txt files.
robots_txt_fetch_markerOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.not documented
separate_search_and_training_tokensOpenAI 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_fullGPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).

Sources