Perplexity-User: Perplexity's on-demand fetcher
Perplexity's fetcher for pages it visits while answering a user's question, linking them in the answer.
- Free, no account.
- A few seconds.
- Nothing is stored.
Perplexity-User at a glance
Everything Perplexity documents about it, with links to the source.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Type
- Fetches on a user's request
- Used for
- Pages a Perplexity user asks it to open
- Obeys robots.txt
- Not always. Perplexity says that because Perplexity-User fetches pages a user asked for, robots.txt rules may not apply. A rule still states your preference; to enforce it, block the published IP addresses at your firewall.
- robots.txt token
Perplexity-User- User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
- IP addresses
- www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
- Documentation
- docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
How to block Perplexity-User
Opens a page because a person asked an assistant to read it. Blocking it stops those visits for the operators that honour robots.txt. Several say they may not, so a firewall rule is the real block.
Block the whole site
Add this group to robots.txt at the root of your site.
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Block only some paths
List the paths; everything else stays open to Perplexity-User.
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /drafts/
robots.txt is a request Perplexity-User may not follow. To enforce it, deny Perplexity's published IP addresses at your server or firewall.
How to verify Perplexity-User
Anyone can send a crawler's user-agent string. Where the request comes from is what proves it.
- 1
Find requests whose user agent contains "Perplexity-User" in your server or CDN logs.
- 2
Check each source IP against Perplexity's published list (www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json). A request from outside it is not Perplexity-User, whatever it says.
- 3
Block what fails the check at the firewall. A robots.txt rule only reaches crawlers that choose to read it.
Other crawlers from Perplexity
Each has its own token, and blocking one leaves the others untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Perplexity's fetcher for pages it visits while answering a user's question, linking them in the answer. Perplexity says that since a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt, and that it is not used for web crawling or to collect training data.
Not always. Perplexity says that because Perplexity-User fetches pages a user asked for, robots.txt rules may not apply. A rule still states your preference; to enforce it, block the published IP addresses at your firewall.
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site: "User-agent: Perplexity-User" followed by "Disallow: /". To close only part of the site, list those paths instead of "/". To enforce the block rather than request it, deny the IP addresses Perplexity publishes at your firewall.
Because Perplexity treats these fetches as a user's own request and says robots.txt may not apply. If you need to stop them, block the crawler's IP addresses at the server or firewall.
Checked against Perplexity's documentation on 29 September 2026.
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