PerplexityBot vs. Perplexity-User: which should you block?

Perplexity documents two crawler tokens with a clear, stated separation: one for indexing, one for answering a specific question — and, importantly, only one of them reliably respects robots.txt.

Should I block PerplexityBot or Perplexity-User?

Leave PerplexityBot allowed if you want to appear in Perplexity search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User fetches pages a user asks about, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, so a rule for it is a preference rather than a block.

What does each Perplexity token do?

• PerplexityBot — search. Perplexity states this crawler is “designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity,” is explicitly not used to train AI foundation models, and respects robots.txt.
• Perplexity-User — user-triggered. Fetches a page when a person asks Perplexity a question that requires visiting it directly, and Perplexity’s own documentation states it generally ignores robots.txt because a specific person, not a bulk crawl, requested the fetch.

What happens when you block each one?

• Disallowing PerplexityBot removes your site from being indexed and cited in Perplexity’s search answers — this is the closest equivalent to blocking a conventional search engine, and this rule is actually honoured.
• Disallowing Perplexity-User is not a reliable way to prevent Perplexity from fetching your page on a user’s direct request — Perplexity’s documentation states this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt precisely because a real person asked the question. If you need to prevent that specific fetch, a robots.txt rule alone is not sufficient; see /limitations for what a robots.txt rule can and cannot guarantee.
• Because Perplexity states neither token is used for foundation model training, there is no separate “training opt-out” decision to make for this operator, unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Meta.

Does blocking PerplexityBot stop AI training?

Site owners who want to “opt out of AI training” sometimes disallow PerplexityBot expecting a training effect, then are surprised their site loses Perplexity search visibility with no training-related benefit, since Perplexity’s own documentation states this crawler isn’t used for that purpose. Confirm what a token actually does — via the crawler directory — before writing a rule intended to achieve a specific outcome, or check your own robots.txt directly with the AI crawler checker.