Perplexity-User
Perplexity · Live retrieval · robots.txt token perplexity-user
2% of 30,177 measured domains disallow perplexity-user in robots.txt at the site root. Separately, and independently of robots.txt, 17.4% of 30,185 reachable domains refuse an AI crawler user agent at the network edge on two consecutive probes from different locations - a refusal the site's own robots.txt does not declare and its owner often has not chosen.
Measured 2026-10-06 by direct request to every domain in the corpus. Method: how this is measured. Reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution.
Cite as: Crawl Census, "Perplexity-User blocking rate", measured 2026-10-06. https://crawlcensus.com/bot/perplexity-user
What it is definition
Fetches a page for a specific user question; Perplexity documents that it generally ignores robots.txt.
Perplexity-User is operated by Perplexity and classified here as live retrieval. These agents fetch a single URL because a user asked about it. Disallowing one means the assistant answers from an older copy or from someone else's summary instead of the live page. Several are documented as not bound by robots.txt, because the request is user-initiated rather than a crawl.
Disallowing perplexity-user stops the fetch that happens when a user asks Perplexity about one of your URLs. The answer still gets written, from an older copy or from a third party's description of the page, and you no longer control what it says.
- robots.txt token
- perplexity-user
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Purpose
- Live retrieval
- Honors robots.txt
- no
- Documentation
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
Identity on the wire exact string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)' https://example.com/Replace the host with your own. A 403, a challenge page or an empty body means the edge is blocking the agent whatever robots.txt says.
How to allow it, how to block it robots.txt
User-agent: perplexity-user
Allow: /Absent any rule, the agent is already allowed, so this group only matters when your * group disallows something. Naming the agent replaces the * group for it entirely, so repeat here every disallow you still want to apply to it.
User-agent: perplexity-user
Disallow: /Disallowing perplexity-user stops the fetch that happens when a user asks Perplexity about one of your URLs. The answer still gets written, from an older copy or from a third party's description of the page, and you no longer control what it says.
Sites that block it 60 shown
See every measured domain that blocks Perplexity-User
This list is served from a cache rebuilt just now. It is discarded the moment a rescan records a policy change for this agent, so a site that has just changed its robots.txt will drop off it within one scan rather than waiting for the cache to expire.
Compare Perplexity
Perplexity runs 2 agents in this registry, and they do different jobs. Blocking one says nothing about the others.
Common questions answered
Does blocking Perplexity-User remove me from Perplexity?
Partly. Perplexity-User fetches a page only when a user asks about it, so disallowing it does not delist you from Perplexity. It does mean the answer is composed without your live page, from a stale copy or a third-party summary. Perplexity documents this agent as not bound by robots.txt, so the disallow is a request rather than a control; see the blocking section for the edge rule that is.
How do I verify Perplexity-User requests are genuine?
Perplexity publishes the address ranges its agents fetch from in its crawler documentation. Compare the source address against that list. Independent testing has recorded retrieval from addresses outside the published ranges and without the declared token, so a match confirms a genuine request but a miss does not prove the traffic is not Perplexity.
Check your own site free
See whether your robots.txt admits Perplexity-User today, and whether your edge agrees with it.