By Iliass El Barhoumi · Published · Last updated
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity: when someone asks a question, it may visit a page to answer accurately and link to it in the response. Perplexity states that it is not used for web crawling or to collect training data, and that because a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| Purpose | live answer fetch · Perplexity answers |
| robots.txt token | Perplexity-User |
| In the user-agent | compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user |
| CrawlRadar weight | 1 of the crawler-access weights, never flagged critical |
| Vendor docs | Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers |
How to allow Perplexity-User in robots.txt
Give Perplexity-User its own group with Allow: /. A named group overrides the User-agent: * group, so this works even when the wildcard disallows everything:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to block Perplexity-User in robots.txt
Replace Allow with Disallow. To block only part of the site, disallow that path instead of /:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /- Tokens are matched case-insensitively, but writing
Perplexity-Userexactly as the vendor spells it avoids surprises with stricter parsers. - Check your CDN and security plugins too: a firewall rule can block Perplexity-User without any line in robots.txt.
Should you block Perplexity-User?
Leave it alone. robots.txt is not the control for Perplexity-User, by Perplexity’s own description, and each fetch is a reader who asked about your page. If you truly need to stop it, that takes a firewall rule against the ranges Perplexity publishes for it, not a robots.txt line.
How to verify a request is really Perplexity-User
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses Perplexity-User uses at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. A request that claims to be Perplexity-User from any other address is someone borrowing the name, and should be treated like any other scraper. CrawlRadar’s collector checks every hit against that list and labels it verified or spoofed.
Perplexity’s other AI crawlers
Each Perplexity token is a separate robots.txt decision. Blocking one has no effect on the others.
| Token | Purpose | What blocking it costs |
|---|---|---|
PerplexityBot | search index | This is the crawler that builds Perplexity’s index. Blocking it takes you out of the pool its answers are drawn from. |
Is Perplexity-User visiting your site?
Your analytics will not tell you. AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a tag-based tool such as Google Analytics never records them. CrawlRadar’s collector reads your own request path and records each Perplexity-User visit, the page it fetched, and whether it came from Perplexity. See the full AI crawler directory for the other tokens CrawlRadar checks.
Frequently asked questions
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
Generally not, by Perplexity’s own documentation, because the fetch is made on a user’s behalf. CrawlRadar still reports your robots.txt rule for it, since the rule records what you intended.
Does a Perplexity-User visit mean Perplexity cited me?
It means Perplexity read your page for a live answer, and its answers link their sources. When someone clicks through, the visit arrives as a referral from perplexity.ai, which CrawlRadar counts as AI traffic.