Crawler directory · User-triggered AI fetcher
Perplexity-User: user agent, robots.txt rules, and how to allow or block it
Perplexity-User fetches a page when a Perplexity user asks a question that needs it, so it is triggered by a person rather than a crawl schedule.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Feeds
- Perplexity live fetching
- Type
- User-triggered AI fetcher
- robots.txt token
- Perplexity-User
Perplexity-User user agent
Requests from Perplexity-User carry a User-Agent header like this (example — vendors change version numbers, so match on the token Perplexity-User, not the whole string):
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
To see how often it visits, filter your access log with grep -i "Perplexity-User" access.log. A User-Agent can be faked, so treat it as a claim, not proof.
Official documentation: docs.perplexity.ai. Vendors change their crawlers, so check it for the current details.
Should you allow or block Perplexity-User?
Blocking stops the assistant reading your page when a person asks it to. That person then gets no answer from your site, so most sites that want AI visibility leave it allowed.
Heads up: Perplexity states that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. Use server-level rules if you need to restrict it.
robots.txt rules for Perplexity-User
Put these in the robots.txt at the root of your domain.
Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Explicitly allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: /
Block only part of your site
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /private/ Allow: /
robots.txt states your policy; it does not enforce it. A CDN or firewall can block a bot your robots.txt allows, which is why it is worth testing rather than assuming.
Check what your site does today
The free AI bot checker reads your robots.txt and tells you whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and nine other AI crawlers are allowed, blocked or crawling by default, then runs a live GPTBot fetch to prove your content is actually served.
Check my site free →Questions, answered
What is Perplexity-User?+
Perplexity-User fetches a page when a Perplexity user asks a question that needs it, so it is triggered by a person rather than a crawl schedule.
How do I block Perplexity-User in robots.txt?+
Add these two lines to the robots.txt at the root of your domain: User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: / User-agent tokens are matched case-insensitively. The rule applies from the crawler's next visit; it does not delete anything already collected. Perplexity states that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. Use server-level rules if you need to restrict it.
Will blocking Perplexity-User affect my Google rankings?+
No. Perplexity-User is separate from Googlebot, so blocking it does not change how Google Search indexes or ranks you. Blocking stops the assistant reading your page when a person asks it to. That person then gets no answer from your site, so most sites that want AI visibility leave it allowed.
What does the Perplexity-User user agent look like?+
An example User-Agent header is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user). Vendors change version numbers, so match on the token Perplexity-User rather than the whole string. A User-Agent can be spoofed, so verify important traffic against the vendor's published details before trusting it.
Related crawlers
More on the trade-offs in the AI bot policies guide and the robots.txt guide.