Perplexity-User fetches a page because a person asked Perplexity about it or clicked through. Fetches a page because a person asked the assistant about it right now; blocking it makes you unreadable at the moment it matters.
Perplexity-User fetches a page because a person asked Perplexity about it or clicked through. It is a live read on a person's behalf, separate from the index crawl.
User-initiated fetch: fetches a page because a person asked the assistant about it right now; blocking it makes you unreadable at the moment it matters.
User-agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)robots.txt token: Perplexity-User. Documented: fetches on a user's behalf; Perplexity states these fetches may not honour robots.txt because a person requested the page.
Perplexity publishes its IP ranges as a feed at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json. A request claiming to be Perplexity-User from an address outside those ranges is an impostor.
AI bot verifier → checks an IP and user-agent against the published ranges and reverse DNS, free.
Blocking it in robots.txt may not stop it — the vendor says user-initiated fetches are treated like a browser visit. Verify by IP range if you need to tell it apart from impostors.
https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
Check your site: the AI Crawler Access Check reads your robots.txt for Perplexity-User and the other AI crawlers and fetches your homepage with each one's real user-agent — the CDN challenge that robots.txt cannot show.
Blocking it in robots.txt may not stop it — the vendor says user-initiated fetches are treated like a browser visit. Verify by IP range if you need to tell it apart from impostors.
Add a group for it: User-agent: Perplexity-User on one line and Allow: / on the next. If a User-agent: * group has a Disallow, the named group takes precedence for Perplexity-User.
User-agent: Perplexity-User then Disallow: /. Documented: fetches on a user's behalf; Perplexity states these fetches may not honour robots.txt because a person requested the page.
Perplexity publishes its IP ranges as a feed at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json. A request claiming to be Perplexity-User from an address outside those ranges is an impostor.
The free crawler check reads your robots.txt per bot and fetches your homepage with each one's real user-agent.