What it does
Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user action crawler. A live fetch made because a human asked the assistant about your page right now. Closest thing to a real visitor; several of these (Perplexity-User, meta-externalfetcher) ignore robots.txt by design because the request is user-initiated.
Vendor's own docs: 'Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.' Blocking requires WAF/IP rules, not robots.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token Perplexity-User (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really Perplexity-User
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list: https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json (fetched live 2026-07-19)
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Confirm the source IP belongs to Perplexity — published IP-range JSON where available, otherwise RDAP/rDNS on the IP. Full method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token Perplexity-User in robots.txt:
# Block Perplexity-User site-wide
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide.
Vendor documentation: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
Frequently asked questions
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user action crawler. A live fetch made because a human asked the assistant about your page right now. Closest thing to a real visitor; several of these (Perplexity-User, meta-externalfetcher) ignore robots.txt by design because the request is user-initiated.
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
No — Perplexity-User does not treat robots.txt as binding. Blocking it requires WAF or IP-level rules.
How do I block Perplexity-User?
robots.txt cannot stop Perplexity-User; block it with WAF or IP-level firewall rules instead.