On demand · Perplexity
Perplexity-User
Fetches a page when a Perplexity user clicks a citation or asks about a specific URL. Perplexity's own documentation states that because the fetch is user-requested, this agent generally ignores robots.txt.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Purpose
- User-triggered fetchers
- Feeds
- Perplexity (live browse)
- robots.txt token
Perplexity-User- Honours robots.txt
- May ignore robots.txt
- Documentation
- docs.perplexity.ai
What it looks like in server logs
A representative user-agent string. Version numbers change; the Perplexity-User token does not. Paste your own log line into the user-agent checker to confirm a match.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)How to block Perplexity-User
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Robots.txt is advisory: it works only on crawlers that choose to read it. This one is may ignore robots.txt. To enforce a block, match the user agent at your CDN or web server and return 403.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /
To block every user-triggered fetcher at once, or to block training while keeping AI search citations, use the robots.txt generator.
How to allow Perplexity-User while blocking others
A more specific User-agent group wins over a wildcard. Place this above any User-agent: * block that disallows paths, and Perplexity-User keeps full access.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
How to verify a genuine hit
The user-agent string is self-asserted: anyone can send it from a laptop, and scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to slip past filters aimed at unknown ones.
Perplexity publishes its IP ranges as JSON; a hit from outside them is spoofed.