Perplexity-User: the agent Perplexity sends when someone asks

Operator

Perplexity

robots.txt token

Perplexity-User

User agent

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

Purpose

Fetches a page when a user asks

Honours robots.txt

Its operator says robots.txt may not apply

Published IP ranges

https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json

Reverse DNS

None documented

Official documentation

Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers

Verified on

2026-10-05

What Perplexity-User does

Perplexity says that when users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page with Perplexity-User to help provide an accurate answer, and include a link to the page in its response. [1]

Perplexity states that Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models. [1]

Allow or block Perplexity-User in robots.txt

Add one of these groups to the robots.txt at the root of each host (each scheme and port counts separately) it should apply to. A crawler that finds one or more groups naming its token follows those groups, merged into one, and ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat in them any * rules you still want applied (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1).

Perplexity says robots.txt may not govern Perplexity-User, so the block group records a preference rather than a guarantee. The section below quotes the operator.

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

What blocking Perplexity-User changes

Perplexity's documentation says 2 things about robots.txt here. It says Perplexity-User controls which sites these user requests can access, and it says that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. [1]

Our reading of the two together: a Disallow for Perplexity-User is a preference Perplexity may not apply. For appearing in Perplexity's search results, Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot. [1]

How to verify a request really is Perplexity-User

Perplexity publishes the IP addresses Perplexity-User uses as a JSON list, which it says is updated regularly, and recommends checking both the user agent and the source address. It documents no reverse-DNS hostname. [1][2]

A crawler policy is one part of being readable by assistants. The AI search readiness guide covers the rest, and robots.txt and crawl access covers the firewall and bot-protection rules that block crawlers before robots.txt is ever read. A full SEO report covers AI search readiness alongside the rest of a site's technical health.