Directory/Categories/AI Search/perplexity-user

perplexity-user

BadBotVerifiedAGENT

The user-agent used by Perplexity AI's search engine to fetch web content for real-time query responses. Operated by Perplexity AI.

Operator website ↗

BadBot

Assessment

AI Search

What is perplexity-user?

Perplexity AI utilizes this user-agent to crawl and index web pages to power its conversational search engine. By fetching live content, the bot enables the platform to provide up-to-date, cited answers to user queries. It operates as a bridge between real-time web data and generative AI models, ensuring that information is accurate and sourced directly from the original publishers.

Helpful — It provides traffic and visibility to websites by surfacing their content in AI-generated search summaries.

Identification

Bot name

perplexity-user

Operator

Perplexity AI

How we rated this bot

Credible reports that it disguises itself or evades site owners' blocks.

Names itself honestly

Not confirmed

Verified by Cloudflare

Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs

Not stated

Ignores site rules

Credible reports found

Disguises itself or evades blocks

Credible reports found

Overloads sites

None found

How widely people complain

Widely reported: news coverage, or a major provider acting against the bot

Reddit discussion

There is no Reddit discussion of this bot in the evidence

What we read

Why it crawls your site

The bot crawls the web to build a comprehensive knowledge base that allows Perplexity to synthesize information for its users. It processes page content to extract relevant facts, context, and citations, which are then presented in a structured, conversational format. Site owners can verify this bot by checking for requests originating from Perplexity's known IP ranges and can manage its access via standard robots.txt directives.

IP ranges

Requests from perplexity-user originate from these published ranges. For strict verification, match the source IP against this list in addition to checking the user-agent and reverse-DNS.

Block or allow perplexity-user

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for perplexity-user in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block perplexity-user from crawling your entire site
User-agent: perplexity-user
Disallow: /

# Allow perplexity-user full access
User-agent: perplexity-user
Allow: /