Perplexity-User

Questions about Perplexity-User

Does Perplexity-User follow robots.txt?

Perplexity says that since a user requested the fetch, Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules. It also says Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.

Perplexity documents Perplexity-User as supporting “user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer” and include relevant links in the response. Perplexity states it is “not employed for web crawling or AI model training.”

Why this is different from PerplexityBot

Perplexity-User requests are triggered by a specific person’s question, not a bulk crawl. It is tracked separately from the search-indexing PerplexityBot.

A robots.txt limitation worth knowing

Perplexity’s own documentation states that, “since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.” A Disallow rule aimed at Perplexity-User is not a reliable way to prevent this specific page from being fetched on a user’s behalf — this is a documented, deliberate design choice by Perplexity, not a CrawlPact-observed workaround. See /limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee more generally.

Site-owner controls

A robots.txt rule for Perplexity-User may not be honoured, per Perplexity’s own documentation above — this differs from PerplexityBot, which does respect robots.txt.

How to verify Perplexity-User requests

Perplexity AI documents this user agent:

                  Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
                

Perplexity publishes Perplexity-User's IP ranges at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Operator documentation.

A user-agent string alone can be copied by anyone; confirming a request really came from Perplexity AI needs your server or CDN logs. CrawlPact audits declared policy and does not see your traffic.

Example robots.txt configuration

To disallow Perplexity-User specifically, without affecting any other crawler:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

If no dedicated User-agent: Perplexity-User group exists in a domain'srobots.txt, this crawler falls back to whatever the wildcard User-agent: * group says (RFC 9309) — see robots.txt syntax basics for how group selection works. A robots.txt rule is a published instruction; it does not technically prevent access.

Official source

https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots

Verified against the source above as of 8 September 2026 — see how CrawlPact verifies crawler information.