Perplexity-User
Perplexity-User is the bot that visits your site when a real Perplexity user asks a specific question that needs to read your page. It doesn't crawl at scale: every visit corresponds to a human query. Since Perplexity includes links to sources in its answers, these visits usually translate into visible citations and clicks to your site.
- User-agent
Perplexity-UserMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)- Does it respect robots.txt?
- No — it ignores the rules
- Official documentation
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
How to allow it in your robots.txt
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to block it (not recommended)
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Frequently asked questions
Should I block Perplexity-User?
It's not advisable, and robots.txt isn't enough to stop it anyway: since its visits are triggered by human users, Perplexity states it generally doesn't apply robots.txt to those requests. Allowing it means your site can appear cited in answers.
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
No. Perplexity's official documentation says that, since these are requests initiated by a user (as if that person opened your site in a browser), it generally ignores robots.txt rules. To really stop it you'd need to block it at the server level.
How do I know if Perplexity-User visits my site?
Search for "Perplexity-User" in your server logs. Every appearance means a Perplexity user asked a question that led the AI to your page — a good visibility signal.