Perplexity-User: user agent, purpose, and whether to allow it
Perplexity-User fetches a page because a person asked Perplexity about it.
Specification
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Live fetchFetches a page in real time because a person asked. Traffic here tracks human interest, not a crawl schedule. |
| Agent kind | FetcherFetches on a person's request. Appears in your logs. Request volume follows human activity. |
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) |
| robots.txt token | Perplexity-User |
| robots.txt compliance | Operator states robots.txt may not apply (user initiated) |
| Verification | Published IP range filehttps://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json |
| Sends referral traffic | Yes |
| Attaches a citation | Yes |
| Status | Active |
| Legacy Kymo category | ai_answer |
| Source | Operator documentationhttps://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots |
| Verified on |
What blocking it costs you
Blocking this prevents Perplexity from reading your page during a live user request. Perplexity documents that because a user requested the fetch, this agent generally ignores robots.txt, so an edge rule is needed to enforce a block. The current token is Perplexity-User; PerplexityBot-User appears in some third-party lists and is not correct.
robots.txt directives
Both blocks below address Perplexity-User only. Rules for one token never apply to another, even from the same operator.
Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: /
Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Questions
What is the Perplexity-User user agent?
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
Operator states robots.txt may not apply (user initiated)
What does blocking Perplexity-User cost me?
Blocking this prevents Perplexity from reading your page during a live user request. Perplexity documents that because a user requested the fetch, this agent generally ignores robots.txt, so an edge rule is needed to enforce a block. The current token is Perplexity-User; PerplexityBot-User appears in some third-party lists and is not correct.
Related crawlers
All AI crawlers and control tokens
See this bot in your own logs
Kymo classifies every crawler hit server-side using this registry, so Perplexity-User shows up under Perplexity with its purpose attached. Read how crawler detection works, or run a free free AI visibility check to see what each crawler currently gets back from your server. No account needed for the check.