Perplexity-User user agent and robots.txt

Perplexity-User loads a page when a person asks Perplexity a question. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, since a person asked.

What it does

Perplexity says that when people ask it a question, Perplexity-User may visit a page to help answer, and include a link to it.

Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.

User agent

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

Perplexity gives this as the full user-agent string.

robots.txt

Perplexity says that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.

To allow it

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

To block it

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Allowed is the default. You only need an allow group if another rule blocks the crawler. A group that names a crawler replaces your User-agent: * rules for it, so copy into it any Disallow lines you still want, such as your admin pages.

What blocking it costs you

A robots.txt rule may not stop it. A firewall block does, and then Perplexity can't read or link your page when a person asks about it.

How to verify real traffic

Check the request's IP against Perplexity's published list for Perplexity-User.
Perplexity-User IP ranges (JSON)

Firewalls and CDNs

robots.txt is only half of it. A firewall, CDN, or bot rule can turn a crawler away before it reads robots.txt.

Perplexity says you may need to allow both of its bots in your firewall, matching user agent and IP together.
If you use Cloudflare, open Security Settings > Configure AI bot policies. Set Search to Allow (do not block). Cloudflare's docs say that since September 15, 2026, blocking Training also blocks crawlers that do both search and training.

With CrawlCoach

CrawlCoach leaves Perplexity-User out of its checks, since Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt. It checks PerplexityBot, the crawler behind Perplexity's search results.

Questions

Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?

Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules, because a person asked for the page. Use a firewall rule if you must stop it.

PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User: what is the difference?

PerplexityBot crawls to find pages for Perplexity's search results and reads robots.txt. Perplexity-User loads a page in the moment, for one person's question.

Related guides

All AI crawlers compared
PerplexityBot (Perplexity search)
ChatGPT-User (Visits a page a person asked for)
Claude-User (Visits a page a person asked for)

Sources

Checked on October 8, 2026. Vendors change their tools and docs, so check the source if something looks different.

Perplexity: Perplexity Crawlers

Perplexity-User: what it is and why robots.txt may not stop it