Perplexity-User
Perplexity-User fetches a page when a Perplexity user asks about it. Here is what it does, its user-agent string, and the honest robots.txt picture.
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user-triggered fetcher. When someone asks Perplexity a question, it may visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer. It supports live user actions rather than bulk indexing.
These bots fetch a page live when someone asks an AI assistant about it. Blocking them means assistants like ChatGPT and Claude cannot read or cite your pages on demand.
The Perplexity-User user-agent string
This is the user-agent string Perplexity documents for Perplexity-User. You will see it in your server logs when the bot visits.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
How do I block Perplexity-User in robots.txt?
Add one of these snippets to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. An explicit group for Perplexity-User overrides your User-agent: * rules for this bot.
Block Perplexity-User
Tells Perplexity-User it may not access any page on your site.
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Allow Perplexity-User
Explicitly allows Perplexity-User, even when a broad Disallow rule blocks other bots.
User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: /
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
No, by design. Perplexity documents that Perplexity-User does not obey robots.txt: “Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.” A robots.txt block is therefore not a reliable way to stop it; server-level rules are.
Should you block Perplexity-User?
For most sites there is little reason to block a fetch a visitor explicitly requested through Perplexity. Be aware, though, that a robots.txt rule will not reliably stop Perplexity-User, since Perplexity states it ignores robots.txt for user-requested fetches — you would need to block it at the server or WAF level.
Official documentation
The facts on this page come from Perplexity's bot documentation. Bot behavior changes — when in doubt, the operator's page is the source of truth:
https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/botsWhat does your robots.txt say about Perplexity-User?
Run your domain through our free checker to see whether Perplexity-User — and 13 other AI crawlers — may access your site right now.