Perplexity-User

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.

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /