Perplexity · user-triggered
Perplexity-User: user agent and how to block it
Everything on this page is taken from Perplexity's own documentation, quoted and linked, and was checked on 4 October 2026. Where the documentation is silent the page says so instead of filling the gap.
What it is
Operator: Perplexity. Kind, as listed here: user-triggered.
“Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
Source: Perplexity crawlers. The robots.txt token to match is Perplexity-User.
Does it obey robots.txt?
“Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
That is the vendor's own exception: a rule written for this agent may not stop it.
Does it affect search?
The Perplexity page we checked does not say.
What else Perplexity says
“It is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.”
Source: Perplexity crawlers, checked 4 October 2026.
robots.txt snippets
Two snippets that show the syntax for this token. They are examples, not advice: whether to allow or refuse Perplexity-User is your decision, and the effects above are the vendor's description of them.
Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: /
Disallow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
How to verify requests
Perplexity publishes the IP addresses for Perplexity-User as a JSON file.
https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
Source: Perplexity crawlers.
Questions
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity describes Perplexity-User like this: “Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response.”
Does Perplexity-User obey robots.txt?
The Perplexity documentation says: “Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.” So a Disallow rule may not stop it.
How do I block Perplexity-User in robots.txt?
Add a group to robots.txt with the line “User-agent: Perplexity-User” followed by “Disallow: /”. That is an example of the syntax, not a recommendation.
Also see the robots.txt tester for AI crawlers and the other entries in the AI crawler reference.
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