What is Perplexity-User?
It visits a page when a Perplexity user asks a question, to help answer it and link to the page. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or to collect AI training data.
Fetches a page because a person asked an assistant about it, right now. Operators often say robots.txt does not apply to these user-triggered fetches.
Perplexity lists Perplexity-User as a robots.txt tag but also says that, because a user requested the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.
Perplexity-User user agent
Perplexity documents this user agent for Perplexity-User. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)Should you block Perplexity-User?
Usually allow it. Each fetch is a person asking about your page right now, which is close to a visit. Blocking it in robots.txt may not stop it, since operators often treat these fetches as the person’s own.
How to block Perplexity-User in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site. Perplexity says it does not follow robots.txt, so this may not stop every fetch.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Perplexity-User
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges Perplexity-User crawls from. A request that claims to be Perplexity-User from any other address is not Perplexity-User.
See when Perplexity-User reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Perplexity’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.