What is Perplexity-User, and how do I block it?

Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user-triggered fetcher. A user-triggered fetcher runs when a person asks an AI product to open a page, not on a schedule.

This is the user agent string Perplexity documents for Perplexity-User, as of October 29, 2026. Version numbers and details can change, so match on the token in robots.txt, not on the whole string.

Add this group to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. It asks Perplexity-User to stay out of every page. Perplexity says the crawler may not follow robots.txt, so this may not stop it.

To allow it explicitly, for example while a broader rule blocks other bots:

Perplexity does not say what blocking Perplexity-User changes. That is not stated.

Each other Perplexity user agent has its own robots.txt token, so a rule for Perplexity-User does not cover them. See the related crawlers below.

No. Operator: generally ignores robots.txt. Perplexity docs: 'Since a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.'

Robots.txt is a request, not a lock (RFC 9309).

Perplexity publishes a list at https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json. We did not download or parse it. A request that claims to be Perplexity-User but comes from outside that list is not Perplexity-User.