robots.txt rules
Copy the group you need into the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Keep only one option per bot.
At a glance
| Detail | Perplexity-User |
|---|---|
| Operator | Perplexity |
| Type | User triggered fetcher |
| What it does | Visits a page when a Perplexity user asks a question that needs it. |
| robots.txt token | Perplexity-User |
| Example user agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) |
| Follows robots.txt | Perplexity says that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. |
| How to verify | Check the request IP against perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. |
| If you block it | robots.txt alone may not stop it. Blocking at the firewall stops Perplexity reading your page for users. |
| Source | Perplexity crawler documentation (docs.perplexity.ai) |
User agent version numbers change over time. Match on the token, not the full string.
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User fetches pages in response to user actions, for example to read a page while answering a question. It is not used to build the index or to train models.
Should you allow or block it?
Allow it if you want Perplexity to read your pages for people asking about you.
If you block it: robots.txt alone may not stop it. Blocking at the firewall stops Perplexity reading your page for users.
- Training crawlers decide whether your content helps build future models. Blocking them does not remove you from AI search today.
- Search crawlers decide whether AI engines can find and cite your pages. Blocking them usually costs visibility.
- User triggered fetchers read a page because a person asked. Blocking them stops the AI reading you at the moment someone is interested.
How to find Perplexity-User in your logs
Search your server or CDN access logs for the token Perplexity-User. This command counts visits by IP, path and status code in a standard access log:
grep -i "Perplexity-User" access.log | awk '{print $1, $7, $9}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
A run of 403 or 503 status codes means your firewall or bot protection is blocking it, even if robots.txt allows it. That is one of the most common hidden reasons sites lose AI visibility.
How to tell if a visit is genuine
Anyone can put Perplexity-User in a user agent string, so the name alone proves nothing. Check the request IP against perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json.
Other Perplexity bots
- PerplexityBot: ai search crawler. Indexes pages so they can appear as sources in Perplexity answers.