Perplexity-User
Perplexity operates Perplexity-User, a fetcher that visits a page when a user asks Perplexity a question and may link it in the answer. Perplexity says it does no crawling or training-data collection and generally ignores robots.txt because a user requested the fetch. Verify it by user-agent matching plus the published IP list at perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json; Perplexity documents no reverse-DNS method.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)What Perplexity-User does
Requests from this fetcher carry the user agent "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)". Each visit corresponds to a question a person asked inside Perplexity, so traffic follows user demand. Perplexity's description is that the fetcher might visit a page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to that page in the response. The operator states that Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling and does not collect content for training AI foundation models. The info URL in the user agent redirects to Perplexity's crawler documentation page.
Perplexity's robots.txt position needs careful reading. The docs say that since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. The same page also says the Perplexity-User token controls which sites these user requests can access. The two statements sit in some tension, and the registry reproduces both rather than resolving them. In practice a site owner should not rely on a robots.txt disallow alone to stop these fetches; if you need a hard block, the published IP list is the only operator-provided data you can act on.
The IP list the docs cite, https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json, redirects to the same path on perplexity.ai and returns a JSON object with a prefixes array. Allowing the fetcher means Perplexity answers can draw on and link your pages when users ask about them; blocking it removes that path. The docs say nothing about JavaScript execution.
Operator note. The docs describe this fetcher as serving user-initiated requests and state: "Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules." The same page also says the Perplexity-User robots.txt token "controls which sites these user requests can access"; the two statements sit in some tension, and both are reproduced here verbatim. The docs cite the range file at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json, which redirects to https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json and lists IPv4 prefixes only. The user-agent info URL https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user redirects to https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers, and JavaScript execution is not mentioned in the docs.
Controlling Perplexity-User with robots.txt
Use the token Perplexity-User in robots.txt. Perplexity documents that this fetcher does not consult robots.txt, so a robots rule will not stop it; see the operator note.
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /Verifying a request is really Perplexity-User
Anyone can put Perplexity-User in a User-Agent header. The operator publishes IP ranges only. The docs say to combine User-Agent string matching with IP address verification against the published JSON range file. No reverse DNS method is documented.
Perplexity publishes a machine-readable list. Our probe read it on 2026-09-06; the file's own creation time was 2025-10-17.
- Prefixes
- 4
- IPv4
- 4
- IPv6
- 0
First entries at fetch time: 44.208.221.197/32, 34.193.163.52/32, 18.97.21.0/30
SHA-256 of the fetched body: 23e55350c44ac51a8a6e7ed786d861db8bc62886fd1cfc228dfa467127223e48
Common questions
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
Perplexity's documentation says that because a user requested the fetch, the fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. The same page also says the Perplexity-User token controls which sites these requests can access. Both statements are the operator's own wording, so treat a robots.txt disallow as unreliable for this fetcher.
How do I verify Perplexity-User?
Match the user agent string, then check the source IP against the JSON file at https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json, which redirects to perplexity.ai. Perplexity says to use both checks together. Perplexity documents no reverse-DNS hostname.
Should I block Perplexity-User?
Perplexity says the fetcher acts only on a user's question and may link the fetched page in its answer; it does not collect training data. Blocking it stops those user-triggered visits and the links that come with them. Because the fetcher generally ignores robots.txt, you would have to block by IP using the published list.
Sources
Every fact on this page was checked against Perplexity's own documentation, listed below, and re-checked by a second reviewer before publication. Reviewed September 2026.
Related crawlers
This registry documents how operators describe their own bots so site owners can identify and control them. It does not publish third-party IP lists or guess at undocumented behaviour. To see how your own site responds to automated visitors, the bot detection scanner reads a URL's live response and names the protection it finds.