Perplexity-User

Perplexity · User-initiated fetcher

Perplexity-User is Perplexity’s user-initiated fetcher — it fetches a page live because a human asked the assistant about it right now. Most vendors state this tier ignores robots.txt, reasoning that a human requested the specific page.

User-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)

Source: vendor-documented at docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots.

Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?

Perplexity’s own wording: “Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”

Allow or block Perplexity-User

# Allow (recommended if you want Perplexity-User traffic)
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

# Block
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Advisory only for this tier: Perplexity’s documentation says this fetcher may not honor robots.txt (see above). For a firm block, filter by verified IP ranges or use a WAF rule.

Verifying it’s really Perplexity-User

Documented on Perplexity’s bot pages. User-agent strings can be spoofed by anyone — identity claims are only trustworthy when the source IP matches the operator’s published ranges.

What site owners should know

The live fetcher behind Perplexity answers when a user asks about your site directly.

Scan your site to see how your robots.txt, content negotiation, and discovery files treat AI agents — including whether you’re blocking agents you meant to allow. Background: the robots.txt guide and agent readiness.

All AI agent user-agents

ClaudeBot · Claude-User · Claude-SearchBot · GPTBot · OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT-User · PerplexityBot · Perplexity-User · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · Meta-ExternalAgent