AI Crawler Directory

Perplexity-User — Perplexity's user-triggered fetcher

Perplexity-User fetches pages on demand when a Perplexity user asks about a specific URL. Notably, Perplexity documents that these fetches generally do not honor robots.txt — its position is that a direct user request makes the fetch user-initiated rather than automated crawling. That makes this bot effectively uncontrollable via robots.txt by design.

User-triggered fetcherReviewed August 2026
Quick facts
Operator
Perplexity
Feeds
Live page fetches when Perplexity users ask about a URL
Type
User-triggered fetcher
robots.txt token
Perplexity-User
Respects robots.txt
Not for user requests
Official docs
docs.perplexity.ai
On this page
  1. 1. What is Perplexity-User?
  2. 2. How to identify Perplexity-User
  3. 3. Controlling Perplexity-User with robots.txt
  4. 4. Should you block or monetize it?
  5. 5. Frequently asked questions

What is Perplexity-User?

Traffic is single-page and query-driven, standing in for a human reader inside Perplexity's interface.

Because robots.txt is not applied to user-triggered fetches, the only way to exclude Perplexity-User is network-level blocking against its published IP ranges — a robots.txt disallow line for this token is documentation, not enforcement.

How to identify Perplexity-User

Perplexity-User identifies itself with the following user-agent string:

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

Never trust the user-agent string alone. Scrapers routinely impersonate well-known crawlers to inherit their access. Perplexity publishes IP ranges for its user-triggered fetcher alongside PerplexityBot's; verify by IP rather than user-agent string.

Note that most AI crawlers and fetchers, Perplexity-User included, do not execute JavaScript — so this traffic is invisible to GA4 and every script-based analytics tool. Server logs, CDN analytics, or a dedicated bot-analytics layer are the only places you will see it. For the full picture of measuring AI-driven visits, see our guide on how to track AI traffic.

Controlling Perplexity-User with robots.txt

To refuse Perplexity-User access to your entire site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

To restrict it from specific sections only (for example, premium content) while leaving the rest open:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /premium/
Disallow: /members/
Worth knowing
Perplexity's own docs state robots.txt is generally not applied to user-triggered fetches. Add the disallow line if you wish, but enforce at the edge if you actually need exclusion.

Should you block or monetize Perplexity-User?

The case for blocking: Hard-paywalled publishers have a real case: on-demand summarization of subscription content is a leak, and since robots.txt won't stop this bot, enforcement requires edge rules.

The case for allowing or monetizing: Each fetch is a human consuming your content through an agent — the exact event that per-fetch licensing and in-answer sponsorship are built to price.

Bottom line
For open content, allow it and treat it as readership. For gated content, know that robots.txt is a no-op here — block by IP at the edge or move the relationship to licensed access.
Where Oasy fits

See exactly what Perplexity-User does on your site — then decide what that access is worth.

Oasy detects and fingerprints 50+ AI crawlers with per-URL analytics, blocks the ones you exclude at the edge, and turns the rest into revenue — licensed RAG access and sponsored placement inside AI answers, settled weekly. Analytics scripts can't see this traffic; your server logs can, and so can we.

Join the waitlist

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn't robots.txt stop Perplexity-User?+

Perplexity's documentation states user-triggered fetches generally ignore robots.txt, on the argument that a human explicitly requested the page. Whatever you think of the argument, the operational consequence is that only network-level blocking works.

How is Perplexity-User different from PerplexityBot?+

PerplexityBot crawls proactively to build Perplexity's index and honors robots.txt (as a declared bot). Perplexity-User fetches single pages only when a user asks, and does not apply robots.txt to those fetches.

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