Perplexity-User
Perplexity's agent for visiting a page to answer a user's question and cite it. Perplexity says that, because a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt.
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Browsing — Perplexity (user requests) |
| robots.txt token | Perplexity-User |
| User-Agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) |
| Obeys robots.txt | Not always: may ignore it when a user triggers the visit (per the publisher) |
| Official IP ranges | https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json — 4 ranges, list dated 2025-10-17 |
| Reverse DNS | Not documented |
| Official documentation | https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers |
Live activity of Perplexity-User
No visit from Perplexity-User recorded on iabig.com over the last 30 days.
Last updated: 2026-10-25 12:07:01 UTC. See the Observatory
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User supports user actions in Perplexity. When someone asks a question, the agent may visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to that page in the response.
What Perplexity states:
- Perplexity-User controls which sites these user requests can access, but because a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.
- It is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.
- Changes to robots.txt can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
To authenticate these requests, Perplexity publishes a JSON file of IP ranges separate from the PerplexityBot list. For web application firewalls it recommends checking both the user agent and the IP address, with automated updates to the ranges. No reverse DNS method is documented.
In practice, robots.txt is not a dependable way to keep this agent out. A site that really wants to refuse these visits has to act at the server or firewall level, knowing that this also stops Perplexity from reading and citing its pages when users ask about them.
Block or allow Perplexity-User
A robots.txt rule has little effect, since Perplexity says the agent generally ignores it. A firewall block stops Perplexity from reading and citing your pages when users ask questions.
To block it, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly (copy any private rules you have):
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /A group naming Perplexity-User replaces the User-agent: * group for it. Build a complete robots.txt with the generator and check it with the tester.
Verify a Perplexity-User visit
Anyone can write “Perplexity-User” in a User-Agent. Paste the IP address and User-Agent from your logs into the IP verifier to know whether the visit is genuine.
Other Perplexity crawlers
- PerplexityBot — Search