Perplexity-User: what it is and how to block it

Operator

Perplexity

Type

User-triggered

robots.txt token

Perplexity-User

Follows robots.txt

No, per Perplexity

IP ranges

Published

Blocked by name

5.4% of top sites

What is Perplexity-User?

Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user-triggered crawler: it fetches a page when a user asks an AI assistant to. In Perplexity's words:

“Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response.”

“It is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.”

Perplexity-User user agent string

Perplexity documents this user agent string for Perplexity-User:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)

In robots.txt, use the token Perplexity-User, not the full string. Crawlers match on the token, and version numbers in the full string can change.

How many websites block Perplexity-User?

In our Oct 8, 2026 check of 817 of the most-visited websites, 5.4% block Perplexity-User by name for their whole site (44 sites).

For comparison, 0.1% of the same sites block Googlebot by name. The sites are the top 1,000 origins in the Chrome UX Report for August 2026; see how we measured.

How to block Perplexity-User in robots.txt

Add this group to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain to block Perplexity-User from your whole site:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

To block only part of your site, list those paths instead:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /private/

A group that names Perplexity-User replaces your User-agent: * rules for it entirely (RFC 9309). If your catch-all group blocks paths that Perplexity-User should also stay out of, repeat them in its group. To let Perplexity-User in while a catch-all rule blocks others:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

Perplexity says robots.txt doesn't fully control Perplexity-User. To stop it completely, block it at your firewall or CDN using the verification details below.

“Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”

What happens if you block Perplexity-User?

Perplexity doesn't document what blocking Perplexity-User changes.

How to verify requests from Perplexity-User

Perplexity publishes the IP addresses Perplexity-User uses. Check a request's IP address against that list before trusting its user agent, which any client can fake.

“combine both User-Agent string matching and IP address verification for enhanced security”

Other Perplexity crawlers

• PerplexityBot · Search

See every AI crawler and how often top sites block it