Perplexity-User: what it is and how to allow or block it
Visits a page when a Perplexity user’s question needs it. Generally ignores robots.txt.
Last checked 2026-10-08
- Company
- Perplexity
- Used for
- Perplexity
- Job
- Fetches a page when a user asks
- Follows robots.txt
- May not, for user requests
- Name in robots.txt
- Perplexity-User
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User opens pages while answering a specific person’s question, and may link to them in the answer. Perplexity says it is not used for crawling the web or collecting training data.
Should you allow it?
Allow it. It only arrives when someone asked about something your page answers.
What blocking it changes: A robots.txt rule will generally not stop it. Stopping it for certain takes a firewall rule against its published addresses.
Allow or block Perplexity-User in robots.txt
Perplexity says that because 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: /
robots.txt lets every bot in by default, so you only need the allow lines if another rule in your file would otherwise block it. Our robots.txt guide explains how rules for different bots combine.
How it appears in your server logs
Perplexity publishes this as the bot’s user-agent string, the label it sends with every visit:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
How to check a visit is really Perplexity-User
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses Perplexity-User fetches from.
Our guide to server log checks shows where to find these visits on common hosting setups.
Source: Perplexity crawler documentation, checked 2026-10-08. Bots and their rules change often, so check the company’s own page before making a decision that matters.
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