Perplexity-User
Perplexity · User fetch · robots.txt: Not always
Visits a web page when a Perplexity user's question needs it, and may link that page in the answer; Perplexity says it is not used for crawling or for training AI models.
Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /A Disallow line will generally not stop Perplexity-User, because Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt. Its published IP list is how the operator lets you identify it, for example in a firewall rule.
Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block Perplexity-User. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Facts
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Purpose
- User-requested fetch
- Obeys robots.txt
- Not always. Perplexity says that because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent string contains "Perplexity-User/1.0".
- How to verify it
- Match the request's IP address against Perplexity's published Perplexity-User IP list.
Published list: www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json — 4 IPv4 ranges when we fetched it, list dated 17 Oct 2025. Always match against the live list; operators update them.
What Perplexity says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“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.”
“Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”
“Always use the most current IP ranges from the official JSON endpoints. These addresses are updated regularly and should be the source of truth for your WAF configurations.”
“Full user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0;”
Sources
- Perplexity: Perplexity Crawlers — fetched and checked 2026-09-22
- Perplexity: Perplexity-User IP ranges (perplexity-user.json) — fetched and checked 2026-09-22