Perplexity-User
Perplexity's user-triggered fetcher, which its own documentation says generally ignores robots.txt.
| Operator | Perplexity |
|---|---|
| What it does | Fetches when a user asks |
| Obeys robots.txt | May bypass, per its operator's docs |
| Governs | Perplexity |
| Has a crawler | Yes |
| Last verified | 13 August 2026 |
What blocking it costs you
What to know
That sentence is Perplexity's, not ours, and it is the whole story for this token. A rule you write here is advisory.
We surface it in reports rather than quietly scoring it, because a site owner who believes they have opted out deserves to know that the operator has published otherwise.
The robots.txt rules
To block Perplexity-User:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /To allow it explicitly — worth doing when your file also contains a blanket User-agent: * disallow, since the most specific matching group wins and a token with no group of its own falls back to the wildcard:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /If neither rule is present, Perplexity-User is allowed. That is the default, and it is why an accidental block is nearly always something that was added rather than something that was forgotten — usually a snippet copied from a blog post that listed more tokens than the author intended to block.
Is it blocked on your site?
Your robots.txt is only the half you can read. A CDN or bot-management rule can turn Perplexity-User away while your file still says it is welcome, and that mismatch is invisible from the front of the site. We check both layers separately and tell you which one is doing what.
We request two things: your robots.txt and your homepage. No other pages, ever.
Official sources
- Perplexity’s crawler documentation
- Published IP ranges — the only way to verify a request claiming this user agent really came from Perplexity
Other Perplexity tokens
- PerplexityBot — Search & citations