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Perplexity-User

Perplexity fetching a page to answer a user's question. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt.

Check if your site lets Perplexity-User in Run the full AI Visibility Check

Last verified: October 2026, against Perplexity's own documentation.

Perplexity-User at a glance.

Owner
Perplexity
Purpose
User-triggered. Perplexity says Perplexity-User supports user actions: when someone asks a question, it may visit a page to answer it and link to that page. Perplexity says it isn't used for web crawling or to collect training content.
robots.txt token
Perplexity-User
Full user agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)

Perplexity calls this an example string and says the version number may change.

IP ranges
www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json
Respects robots.txt?
Generally ignores robots.txt. Generally no. Perplexity says that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.

The robots.txt rules to copy.

Your robots.txt lives at the root of your domain, like yoursite.com/robots.txt. On Shopify you edit it by adding a robots.txt.liquid template to your theme. Shopify warns that a wrong edit can cost you all your traffic, so change one rule at a time.

Allow Perplexity-User

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

A bot with no rule is already allowed. Add this only when a broader rule, such as User-agent: * with Disallow: /, would otherwise block it.

Block Perplexity-User

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Robots.txt won't reliably stop this one. Perplexity says this agent generally ignores robots.txt. The rule states your preference. To enforce it, block the published IP ranges at your firewall or CDN.

Should you block Perplexity-User on a local business site or a Shopify store?

When someone asks Perplexity about you, this agent reads your page, and Perplexity says the answer links back to it. Blocking it at the firewall removes a page Perplexity would have linked to.

A robots.txt rule won't reliably stop it. If you have a real reason to block it, do it at the firewall with Perplexity's IP list. I'd leave it alone.

A rule you didn't write can block it too: an old robots.txt template, a security plugin or a CDN bot setting. The AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt for Perplexity-User and the other bots in this directory.

The 12 bots, sorted by job

  1. Search and answers

    3 bots

    They build the index an AI assistant searches when it answers.

    If you block themPer their owners, blocking one can drop you from that assistant's search answers.

  2. Perplexity-User is in this group

    Fetching a page when a user asks

    3 bots

    They fetch your page because a person asked the assistant about it.

    If you block themBlocked at your firewall, the assistant can't read your page for the person who asked. Two of the three may not follow a robots.txt block.

  3. Model training

    6 bots

    A block here tells the owner to keep your pages out of AI model training. CCBot is here because its open archive can be used that way.

    If you block themFor most, the owner says blocking doesn't remove you from its search features. Meta says its crawler also indexes content for its products.

Where Perplexity-User sits among the 12 AI bots in this directory, grouped by what each one does, with what blocking each group costs you.

Related crawlers.

Sources

Last verified: October 2026. Where the owner doesn't document something, this page says so instead of guessing.

  1. Perplexity, Perplexity Crawlers

Crawler access is the first thing I check in an AI answer audit. Most of what decides who gets named is what other sites say about you.

Check your robots.txt Or run the full AI Visibility Check