What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User is the agent Perplexity uses to visit a web page when a user's question needs it, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt. Perplexity runs two agents. PerplexityBot indexes the web for Perplexity's results; Perplexity-User visits a page when a user's question needs it, and Perplexity says that fetcher generally ignores robots.txt.
What does Perplexity-User do?
Perplexity says Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity: when users ask a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response. It says the agent is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models (Perplexity's bot docs, read Oct 15, 2026).
Does Perplexity-User follow robots.txt?
Generally not. Perplexity states that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. A Disallow for Perplexity-User is therefore not a reliable way to stop it.
Perplexity says Perplexity-User controls which sites these user requests can access, and that changes may take up to 24 hours to show. If a page must not be read, put it behind authentication; if you want Perplexity to read it, make sure your CDN does not block the agent.
How do you recognize and verify Perplexity-User?
Perplexity publishes its full user-agent string and an IP list at perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Match the token in your logs, then confirm the IP is on the list.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)What does this mean for citations, in a real example?
Perplexity cites heavily. In the public Tesla example (Oct 4, 2026), it gave 375 citations across 25 buyer questions, the most of the four engines, and named Tesla in 10 answers.
Its most cited site was autoedgeview.com, 21 times; tesla.com got 3. Between PerplexityBot's index and Perplexity-User's fetches, being readable by both is the entry ticket to that pool.
How do you see Perplexity-User on your site?
Proofsource counts AI fetcher requests from your Cloudflare zone or access logs, Perplexity-User included, verified against Perplexity's published IP ranges. See AI Traffic and how Perplexity picks the brands it names.
Common questions about Perplexity-User
Is Perplexity-User the same as PerplexityBot?
No. PerplexityBot indexes pages to surface and link them in Perplexity's results. Perplexity-User fetches a page for a user's question.
Does Perplexity train AI models on pages Perplexity-User fetches?
Perplexity says Perplexity-User is not used to collect content for training AI foundation models.
How do I block Perplexity-User?
robots.txt is not reliable for it, by Perplexity's own description. A firewall rule on the agent and its published IPs blocks it, at the cost of Perplexity not reading your page for users.
Should I allow Perplexity-User?
If you want to be cited in Perplexity answers, yes. It is how Perplexity reads a page for the person asking.
Related terms
- PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is Perplexity's crawler that indexes web pages so they can be surfaced and linked in Perplexity's search results.
- ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is the agent OpenAI uses when ChatGPT or a custom GPT visits a web page because of something a user asked.
- Claude-User
Claude-User is the agent Anthropic uses to fetch a web page when a person asks Claude a question that needs it.
- robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, under the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309).
Worked example: Tesla, public AI answers, Oct 4, 2026: Proofsource's first scan of Tesla, 25 buyer questions and 5 brand questions, one answer per question on each of four engines. A small sample from one brand, shown as an example, not a benchmark.
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