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Crawlers

How often does Perplexity recrawl a site?

Short answer

Perplexity does not publish a crawl schedule, and anyone quoting a specific interval is guessing. In practice it leans heavily on live retrieval and favours recent content, so newly published pages can be surfaced quickly — sometimes within days. The only reliable answer for your site is to measure it.

By The EchoVerse teamUpdated 4 min read

Why there is no fixed number

Crawl frequency is not a single global setting. It varies with how often a site changes, how much it is linked, how fast it responds, and how often its pages satisfy real queries. A frequently updated, well-linked site gets revisited more than a static one. That is true of every crawler, and Perplexity publishes no schedule to contradict it.

Be sceptical of any article stating a specific figure. Those numbers are typically extrapolated from one site's logs and do not generalise.

Measure it for your own site

This is the only answer that means anything, and it takes a few minutes if you have log access:


grep -i "perplexitybot" /var/log/nginx/access.log | tail -50

If you are on a platform without raw logs, most analytics and CDN dashboards let you filter by user agent. Look at two things: how frequently PerplexityBot appears, and whether it is receiving 200s rather than 403s.

That second point catches a surprising number of problems. Bot-protection rules routinely block unfamiliar agents, and a crawler getting a 403 never reads your robots.txt, so a perfectly permissive file can sit behind a rule that makes it irrelevant.

How to get recrawled sooner

The levers are ordinary and unglamorous:

  • Keep <lastmod> accurate in your sitemap. It is one of the few fields crawlers

    • actually use, and an inaccurate one trains them to ignore it.

  • Publish on a rhythm. Sites that change get revisited more often than sites that do not.
  • Earn links to new pages. Discovery still follows links, including from your own site —

    • an orphaned page with no internal links is slow to be found and slow to be revisited.

  • Be fast and reliable. Timeouts and 5xx responses reduce crawl appetite.

Freshness matters more here than elsewhere

Perplexity's model of answering leans on live retrieval and tends to favour recent sources, which cuts both ways. New content can surface quickly. Content that is visibly stale — an undated page, or one whose facts have aged — competes badly against a competitor who updated last week.

If a page matters, keep its dateModified honest and actually update it. Bumping the date without changing the content is the version of this that fails, because the claim stops matching the page.

Common questions

How quickly can a new page appear in Perplexity?
There is no guaranteed interval, but because Perplexity leans on live retrieval and favours recent content, new pages can surface within days when the site is crawlable and reasonably linked. Measure your own logs rather than relying on a published figure.
How do I confirm PerplexityBot is reaching my site?
Filter server logs or your CDN dashboard for the PerplexityBot user agent and confirm it is receiving 200 responses. A 403 means a bot-protection rule is blocking it above the robots.txt layer, which overrides anything robots.txt says.
Does updating the dateModified field trigger a recrawl?
Not by itself, and changing the date without changing the content is counterproductive. Accurate lastmod values in your sitemap help crawlers prioritise, but only if they have proven reliable.
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