AI crawler index

What is Perplexity-User?

Perplexity-User is Perplexity's fetcher for pages users ask about. Visits a page when a Perplexity user asks a question that needs it, and links it in the answer.

At a glance

Operator	Perplexity
Purpose	User-triggered fetch
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: the operator says user-requested visits may ignore it
Published IP ranges	https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
How to verify it	Match both the user agent and the source IP against Perplexity's published list.
Official documentation	https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers

Should you block Perplexity-User?

It visits a page only when a user asks the assistant something that needs it. Blocking it stops the assistant from reading your page in those moments, which costs you citations; and because a person starts each request, robots.txt may not stop it.

Perplexity says that, because a user requests the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt; stopping it takes a firewall or IP rule.

How to block or allow Perplexity-User in robots.txt

Block it everywhere:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Allow it everywhere:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

Rules are matched by the token on the User-agent line. Test the result with the robots.txt tester before you publish it.

Other Perplexity crawlers

PerplexityBot: AI search

Check your own site

The AI crawler checker tells you which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, and the log file analyzer shows how often each one actually visits. For the bigger picture, see what AI crawlers are and the full AI crawler index.

FAQ

Perplexity-User questions

Perplexity-User is Perplexity's fetcher for pages users ask about. Visits a page when a Perplexity user asks a question that needs it, and links it in the answer.

Not always. Perplexity says that, because a user starts each visit, robots.txt rules may not apply. A firewall or IP rule is the reliable way to stop it.

Add "User-agent: Perplexity-User" followed by "Disallow: /" to your robots.txt. Because robots.txt may not apply to it, back the rule with a firewall or IP rule. Perplexity says that, because a user requests the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt; stopping it takes a firewall or IP rule.

Start tracking your brand in AI search today

Monitor how AI engines cite your brand, track keyword positions, and benchmark against competitors, all in one platform.