Quick answer: Perplexity-User is the agent Perplexity uses to visit a web page when a user asks a question that needs it. It is not a crawler and it is not used for training. Perplexity says that because the fetch is requested by a user, this agent generally ignores robots.txt rules.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Type
- User-triggered fetcher
- robots.txt token
Perplexity-User- Follows robots.txt
- Generally no, fetches are user-initiated
- Used for
- Visiting a page live when a Perplexity user's question needs it
- User agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)- How to verify
- Compare the source IP with the ranges Perplexity publishes at perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
What is Perplexity-User?
When Perplexity answers, it often reads pages in real time to get current details. Those requests identify as Perplexity-User. They are driven by what users ask, not by a crawl schedule, and they usually target the specific page that best matches the question.
The indexing side of Perplexity is PerplexityBot, which does respect robots.txt. Keeping the two apart matters when you read logs and when you decide what to block.
What happens if you block Perplexity-User?
A robots.txt rule is generally not honored for Perplexity-User. To stop it you need a firewall or CDN rule on its user agent and Perplexity's published IP ranges. Blocking it means Perplexity cannot read your page live, so answers about your topic will cite other sites.
Should you allow Perplexity-User?
Allow it. A Perplexity-User hit is effectively a person researching a topic you cover. Blocking it only makes sense for content that should never leave your site, and that content belongs behind a login.
Check whether Perplexity-User can reach your site
Enter your domain or a specific page. The checker reads your live robots.txt, picks the group Perplexity-User would use, and applies the longest matching rule, the same way major crawlers resolve conflicts.
robots.txt rules for Perplexity-User
Put each group in the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. User agent names are matched without regard to case, and the most specific matching group wins.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Allow: /The rule most people get wrong: once Perplexity-User has its own group, it ignores everything under User-agent: *. If your wildcard group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines inside the Perplexity-User group too.
Because Perplexity-User acts on behalf of a user, a robots.txt rule states your preference but does not enforce it. To enforce a block, add a firewall rule. On Cloudflare, a custom WAF rule with this expression and the Block action does it:
(http.user_agent contains "Perplexity-User")Common Perplexity setup: be indexed and cited by Perplexity
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to verify real Perplexity-User traffic
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges for Perplexity-User at perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Compare requests against that list before acting, since user-agent strings are easy to copy.
To see how often it visits, count requests by user agent in your access log. On a typical Nginx server:
grep -i "Perplexity-User" /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -cPerplexity-User compared with other Perplexity agents
| Agent | Operator | Type | Follows robots.txt |
|---|---|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Search crawler | Yes |
| Perplexity-User | Perplexity | User-triggered fetcher | Generally no, fetches are user-initiated |
See all 20 agents side by side in the AI crawler directory.
Perplexity-User FAQ
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