Should you block Perplexity-User? Perplexity's live fetcher
Perplexity-User is operated by Perplexity. It fetches pages on demand when a user's request needs them, so what it reads feeds live answers and citations rather than a training set.
Who should block Perplexity-User, and who should not?
Treat it as a reader, not a crawler: it arrives because of someone's question, and Perplexity says the answer can include a link to your page. Leave it open for public pages. A robots.txt rule will generally be ignored, so if a section must stay out of Perplexity answers, the controls that work are a login or a CDN rule on the published IP list. Blocking it does nothing about indexing, which is PerplexityBot's job.
The verified facts
| User-agent token | Perplexity-User/1.0 |
|---|---|
| Full user agent in logs | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) |
| Operator | Perplexity |
| Purpose | Live retrieval and user-request fetchers |
| Honors robots.txt | No. |
| Published IP ranges | www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json |
What does Perplexity’s documentation add?
- When a user asks Perplexity a question, it may visit a page to answer and include a link to that page in its response.
- Because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.
- Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.
How do you block Perplexity-User?
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Once you give a crawler its own group, it stops reading your User-agent: * rules, so run the whole file through the AI crawler robots.txt tester before you deploy it.
Because robots.txt compliance is not claimed for this bot, a robots.txt line is a request, not an enforcement. Enforcement requires blocking at the CDN or firewall using the verification data on this page.
How do you tell a real Perplexity-User request from a fake one?
A user-agent match proves nothing, since any client can send Perplexity-User/1.0. Check the IP against the published range file above, re-fetched on a schedule. A request that fails is not Perplexity. The log verification guide has a script for the IP check and a worked reverse-DNS example, or paste the IP into the AI crawler IP verifier, which runs these checks against Perplexity’s current data.
What does blocking Perplexity-User cost you?
Where the block is enforced, Perplexity cannot visit your pages to answer a user's question. Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt.
What else does Perplexity document?
Perplexity also documents PerplexityBot, which has its own robots.txt token. How Perplexity’s crawlers fit together.
Which crawlers in the same group should you decide on at the same time?
A robots.txt group for Perplexity-User does nothing to crawlers with other tokens. In the same group, the directory also covers meta-externalfetcher (Meta), Amzn-User (Amazon), MistralAI-User (Mistral), ChatGPT-User (OpenAI) and Claude-User (Anthropic), each with its own token and its own documented cost of blocking.