What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User is the agent behind user actions in Perplexity: when a user asks about a specific page or clicks a citation, this agent fetches it live. Perplexity documents it separately from PerplexityBot, its index crawler.
Should I allow Perplexity-User to crawl my site?
These fetches happen at answer time, when a user has already expressed intent. Allowing Perplexity-User keeps your pages readable in the answers users see; because it acts on direct user requests, robots.txt rules generally don't stop it.
How to control Perplexity-User
Target Perplexity-User in your robots.txt with the Perplexity-User token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Perplexity documents that because Perplexity-User acts on direct user requests, it generally does not follow robots.txt rules. Perplexity publishes its IP ranges for verification.
User-agent string
As published by Perplexity. Remember that user-agent strings can be spoofed, so verify suspicious traffic against the operator's published IP ranges.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)Perplexity-User FAQ
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity: when a user asks a question, it may visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer. It is distinct from PerplexityBot, the crawler that surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results.
How do I block Perplexity-User?
You can add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Perplexity-User" and "Disallow: /", but Perplexity documents that this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules because its requests are user-initiated. Perplexity publishes the fetcher's IP addresses at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json, which you can use to identify or block the traffic at the network level.
About AI Assistant Fetchers
Agents that fetch a page in real time because a user asked an AI assistant about it. They don't build an index; each visit maps to a live conversation.
Blocking these removes your pages from live AI answers at the exact moment a user is asking about you or your category.
