Perplexity-User
Operated by Perplexity · Powers Perplexity
When a user asks Perplexity a question, Perplexity-User may visit a specific web page on their behalf to help produce an accurate, cited answer. Perplexity's own documentation notes that, because a user requested the fetch, this agent generally ignores robots.txt rules.
What it does
Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When someone asks a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to that page in the response — it is not used for broad web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.
Perplexity's crawler documentation states that Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt because requests are user-initiated — this differs from PerplexityBot, which respects robots.txt for its automated indexing crawl. Perplexity also states that its previous feature for accessing specific URLs blocked by robots.txt has been disabled.
Why we recommend keeping it open
- Responds to a specific person's question, not a bulk crawl
- Not used to train Perplexity's foundation models, per Perplexity's documentation
- Perplexity states this agent generally ignores robots.txt for user-initiated requests, so robots.txt control here is limited
Identification & robots.txt
Perplexity-User
Additional verification information is available in Perplexity's official documentation.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /