AI crawlers · Perplexity

Perplexity-User

Perplexity-User is a crawler operated by Perplexity, and it fetches your page while a person waits for an answer — the fact that decides everything else on this page.

What does Perplexity-User actually do?

Perplexity-User fires when a question needs your particular page: a result somebody clicked, a URL they pasted. Perplexity's own documentation is explicit that because a person triggered the fetch, this agent is not governed by robots.txt the way an indexing crawler is. That single sentence should shape every rule you write about it.

The practical consequence is that a Disallow line is not a control here, it is a request. If you want these fetches stopped, it has to happen where you can actually enforce it - a rule on the user-agent at your edge, or on the published address ranges - because the vendor has documented in advance that the robots file will not do it.

In logs it looks nothing like PerplexityBot. Single URLs, no traversal, arrivals clustered around whatever is being discussed rather than spread evenly across your site. Keep the two counted separately: the index crawl's steady background volume will otherwise swamp the fetches that actually correspond to somebody reading an answer about you.

Check where you are fetching the address list from. Perplexity's published files are now served under perplexity.com, and a verification job still pointed at the older perplexity.ai path is the kind of thing that keeps working until it quietly does not. An address check that silently fails produces the same symptom as a scraper - familiar user-agent, unfamiliar address - which is the worst possible way for a stale URL to announce itself.

CrawlClick files Perplexity-User as a query time crawl. What the three crawl purposes mean.

A robots rule that names Perplexity rather than Perplexity-User also lands on PerplexityBot (search index), which does a different job. Blocking the wrong one of a vendor's agents is the commonest mistake in this whole subject.

Should I block Perplexity-User?

Publishers add a Disallow for it and consider the matter closed, when Perplexity documents this agent as user-triggered and therefore not bound by robots.txt.

To block it anyway, add this to robots.txt (how the rules resolve):

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Replace Disallow: / with Allow: / to permit it explicitly. A crawler that ignores robots.txt is not blocked by it either way — that is what verification and edge rules are for.

How do I verify Perplexity-User is genuine?

Perplexity lets you check a request claiming to be Perplexity-User against published IP ranges. A user-agent header on its own proves nothing.

Its address list lives at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json.

The verification procedure explains why a reverse lookup has to be forward-confirmed, and why a published range list has to be re-fetched rather than pinned.

How do I find Perplexity-User in my logs?

Match the user-agent against "perplexity-user", case-insensitively. Every Perplexity-User fetch had somebody waiting on it, so this count maps onto real questions being asked about your pages rather than onto crawl budget.

Crawl-to-referral gap defines the ratio, and the rate-limiting guide covers what to do when the volume itself is the problem.

Registry last reviewed 2026-09-13.