Perplexity-User
Fetches made when a person follows your link inside Perplexity
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User fetches a page because a person following a Perplexity answer asked to see it. It is not part of indexing, and a block on it does not remove you from results — it stops the reader arriving.
Perplexity is explicit that this agent is not governed the way PerplexityBot is, on the reasoning that a user-initiated request is the user's request rather than the crawler's. Whether you accept that reasoning is a separate question from knowing that it is their stated position.
Four IP prefixes, the smallest list of any agent here.
How to block Perplexity-User
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /What that costs you: A user who clicks through to you from Perplexity may not reach the page.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
The short token is what robots.txt matches. This is what actually arrives in an access log, copied from Perplexity’s documentation. Version numbers move, so match on the token rather than the whole string.
User-agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)To find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'Perplexity-User' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really Perplexity-User
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. Perplexity publishes the addresses Perplexity-User fetches from: 4 prefixes when we read the file, last changed on 17 October 2025. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
Terminal
curl -s https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json | python3 -c "
import sys, json, ipaddress
addr = ipaddress.ip_address('203.0.113.10') # the address from your logs
nets = json.load(sys.stdin)['prefixes']
print(any(addr in ipaddress.ip_network(n.get('ipv4Prefix') or n['ipv6Prefix']) for n in nets))
"False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
What Perplexity says about it
It says it ignores robots.txt
Perplexity's documentation states plainly that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. That is their published position rather than an accusation, and it means a Disallow aimed at Perplexity-User is a request rather than a control.
Read from https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots on 14 September 2026.
Should you block Perplexity-User?
Blocking it does not remove you from Perplexity's results. It stops the reader arriving after they have already chosen you, which is close to the worst available outcome.
It also may not work. Perplexity states this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested it, so if you need it stopped, the edge is the only place that will do it.
Questions
- Does Perplexity-User obey robots.txt?
- Perplexity's documentation says user-triggered fetches are treated differently from crawling. If you need certainty rather than a stated policy, the enforcement point is your network edge, not your robots.txt.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from Perplexity’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is Perplexity-User allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.