Bots
Perplexity-User: the fetch a person asked for
Perplexity-User is the agent Perplexity uses when a person's question needs a specific page; the answer includes a link to that page. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the fetch, and that it does not collect training data. Allow it if you want to be cited. Verify visits against Perplexity's published perplexity-user.json file.
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0requests filed as Perplexity-User · 30 days
of 143,601 AI crawler requests from 7 operators
| Agent | AI requests, 30 days | attensira.com robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity-User (this page) | 0 | Allowed |
| ChatGPT-User | ≈230 | Allowed |
| Claude-User | ≈36 | Allowed |
| Amzn-User | 0 | Wildcard |
| MistralAI-User | 0 | Allowed |
2 of 5 had requests filed in the window. User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP, and our live robots.txt · · n=143,601 AI requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block Perplexity-User in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. The operator says the agent may not read robots.txt, so the group records your preference; enforce anything sensitive on the server. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves Perplexity-User today.
# Addressable, but documented as generally ignoring# robots.txt: this is a preference, not an enforcement# point.User-agent: Perplexity-UserDisallow: /internal/User-agent: Perplexity-UserAllow: /Disallow: /api/We name Perplexity-User and allow it everywhere except /api/, the same as every AI and search crawler we allow by name. Its operator states robots.txt may not apply to it, so this group is a preference at most.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs Perplexity-User, and what is it for?
Perplexity runs it, and we file it under user-triggered fetch. Fetches a specific page when a person's question in Perplexity needs it, and the answer includes a link to that page.
From Perplexity’s documentation, read . Why a training fetch and a search fetch are different decisions: the AI crawler guide.
Why is Perplexity-User classed as not bound by robots.txt?
Perplexity lists the token among the robots.txt tags webmasters can set and says it "controls which sites these user requests can access",6 but also that the fetcher generally ignores robots.txt when a user requested the fetch. Read together, the token records your preference without treating it as binding, which is the same position OpenAI takes for ChatGPT-User, Amazon for Amzn-User and Meta for Meta-ExternalFetcher, and it was published openly.
What does a Perplexity-User fetch tell you?
A user-triggered fetch is a different event from a crawl. A crawler comes on its own schedule to look at everything; this fetches one URL, now, because a person asked something that page can answer. A rise in verified Perplexity-User fetches therefore means people are asking Perplexity questions your pages are consulted to answer.
It will not appear in your analytics as a session, and it may never produce a click. It is still the earliest observable evidence that you are in the answer path, earlier than referrals and much earlier than a rank tracker. Treat it as a metric to watch, not a nuisance to suppress. The agent-by-agent case is in what to allow and what to block, and the robots.txt generator writes the rules across every operator on this site.
How do I verify that a visit really came from Perplexity-User?
Check the source address against www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json. Perplexity publishes it separately from the PerplexityBot file, so verifying against the right one tells you which agent called, whatever the header claimed. The header alone proves nothing, because a token tied to real answers is worth borrowing. Since the fetcher generally ignores robots.txt, this file is also the input for an enforceable block: a network rule on these addresses stops the fetch, where a robots.txt group only states a preference. The general procedure is in verifying a crawler.
- IP range file
- perplexity-user.json
Perplexity publishes no reverse-DNS suffix for Perplexity-User; verify by the range file.
ResearcherTranscribed from Perplexity documentation · How often do sites block Perplexity-User?
Measured by us, not reported by Perplexity: the robots.txt of the 10,000 highest-ranked domains on the Tranco list for 2026-09-01. A domain that never mentions the token wrote no policy for it.
The method and every row, with the CSV.
- disallow Perplexity-User at the root
- 5.7%
- 461 of 8,036 domains
- allow it by name
- 1.5%
- 121 domains
- never mention it
- 92.8%
- 7,454 domains
What user-agent string does Perplexity-User send?
Match the token, never the version. A rule pinned to a version stops matching silently the next time the operator ships.
The version in this string changes; check Perplexity’s page before relying on the exact text.
What does allowing Perplexity-User cost?
Allowing it costs one fetch per question that needs your page, and the answer links to you. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt for these fetches and collects no training data, so a robots.txt block may not stop it and still costs you those citations.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https:/Should I allow Perplexity-User in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
You disallowed Perplexity-User in robots.txt and the requests kept arriving.
Stop treating the robots.txt rule as the control and decide whether you actually want a network block.
Perplexity documents that this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested it. The rule is not being violated in secret — the operator published the behaviour. If you genuinely want the fetch stopped, the enforceable layer is the address file, and blocking it means a person who asked about you gets an answer assembled without your page.
Traffic under this token spiked after you published something that got attention.
Read it as demand, not as an attack, and check the addresses before you rate-limit.
A user-triggered fetch happens because somebody asked a question your page answers. That is the traffic pattern this whole site exists to measure. Rate-limiting it degrades the answers people are shown about you, which is the opposite of what most sites want from Perplexity.
You need to know whether Perplexity is training on your content or answering questions with it.
Split your logs by token — Perplexity-User and PerplexityBot on one side, training crawlers from other operators on the other.
Perplexity documents Perplexity-User as not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models, and PerplexityBot as not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Neither of Perplexity's two documented tokens is a training agent, so a training objection aimed at Perplexity has no token to attach to.
What else do people ask?
Can I block Perplexity-User at all?
Is Perplexity-User training on my content?
Should I treat Perplexity-User traffic as a visit?
How do I tell Perplexity-User from PerplexityBot in my logs?
Where do these facts come from?
6 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.
Perplexity documents Perplexity-User as supporting user actions within Perplexity, visiting a web page when users ask a question to help provide an accurate answer and including a link to the page in its response.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response.”
Perplexity publishes Perplexity-User's full user-agent string as "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)".
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved · changes often, check the source
Perplexity states that since a user requested the fetch, the Perplexity-User fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.”
Perplexity states that Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“It is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.”
Perplexity publishes the addresses Perplexity-User fetches from at www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
Perplexity states that Perplexity-User controls which sites these user requests can access, and that each robots.txt setting works independently.
docs.perplexity.ai · retrieved
“Perplexity-User controls which sites these user requests can access.”
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