Perplexity-User

Operator

Perplexity

Type

AI Assistant

Official page

docs.perplexity.ai

robots.txt token

Perplexity-User

Follows robots.txt

No, according to Perplexity.

Published IP ranges

perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Visits pages when a Perplexity user asks a question, to answer it and link the page.

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

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: Only when prompted by a user.

User agent

Requests from Perplexity-User carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

Perplexity-User

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Perplexity-User

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.

Perplexity

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

Worth knowing

It generally ignores robots.txt. To block it you need a user agent or IP rule at the server or WAF.

Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.

Perplexity

How Vireo counts Perplexity-User

Vireo keeps requests from Perplexity-User out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under AI crawlers, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Perplexity-User's user agents.

Sources

• Perplexity: crawler documentation (checked October 2026)
• Perplexity-User information page (docs.perplexity.ai)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)