Perplexity-User: user agent, IP verification and robots.txt
Perplexity-User is operated by Perplexity. It is classified here as Not a crawler (User-triggered fetch). Verification method: Published CIDR list.
Exact 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. The user-agent string is self-asserted and can be
forged by anyone. It is a claim, not proof.
How to verify Perplexity-User is genuine
Match the source IP against Perplexity's published CIDR list: https://www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
4 ranges published, as of 2025-10-17. Pulled live at build time, never hardcoded.
How to block or allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Replace Disallow with Allow to permit it explicitly.
What blocking Perplexity-User costs you
Blocking Perplexity-User stops the fetch that happens when a user's question needs your page, and Perplexity notes the answer may include a link to that page. You are declining a citation with a live reader attached to it.
What is specific to Perplexity-User
Perplexity documents that because a user requested the fetch, Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules. That is a stronger statement than OpenAI's may not apply, and it means a Disallow line is not a control for this agent, only a signal. If you actually need to stop it, the published four-prefix range file is the enforceable surface, and it is small enough to put in a WAF rule directly. Note that the perplexity.com URL the documentation gives redirects to perplexity.ai, which is where the file is actually served.
Verify a request claiming to be Perplexity-User
Check a Perplexity-User request against Perplexity's published ranges
Source
Primary documentation: https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots. Last verified 2026-08-02.
Other Perplexity crawlers
- PerplexityBot - Search index