PerplexityBot User Agent: robots.txt Rules and Official Documentation

Perplexity publishes the exact user agent strings for its two crawlers in its own bots documentation, and the two are easy to confuse because their names are nearly identical. PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User do different jobs, and only one of them reliably follows robots.txt.

The two crawlers and their exact strings

Both strings are copied directly from Perplexity's documentation. If you see a request in your logs claiming to be either bot but not matching these strings exactly, it did not come from Perplexity.

Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt

Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot so your site can appear in Perplexity's search results. The rule is a normal, single block:

# Perplexity
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /

It is worth being precise about what Perplexity's documentation does and does not say. It explicitly recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt. It does not, in the same document, spell out in plain terms that PerplexityBot itself always obeys every robots.txt directive the way some other companies state outright for their crawlers. Treat the recommendation to allow it as the operative guidance, since that is what Perplexity's own docs actually commit to.

Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt, so block it differently

Perplexity states plainly that Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules, because the fetch was directly requested by a person using Perplexity, not run as a background crawl. A Disallow rule for Perplexity-User is not a reliable way to stop it. If you genuinely need to block it, that has to happen at the firewall or server level, the same category of fix covered in how to fix AI crawler 403 and 405 errors, rather than in robots.txt.

Verifying requests against the IP lists

Perplexity publishes two separate IP address JSON files, one for each crawler:

• perplexity.com/perplexitybot.json for PerplexityBot
• perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json for Perplexity-User

A user agent string on its own can be copied by anything, so if you need to confirm a request genuinely came from Perplexity, cross check the request's IP address against the current list rather than trusting the string alone.

Frequently asked questions

What is the exact PerplexityBot user agent string?

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot), exactly as published in Perplexity's own bots documentation.

Is PerplexityBot the same as Perplexity-User?

No. PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User fetches a page only when a person has asked Perplexity a direct question.

Does PerplexityBot respect robots.txt?

Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt so your site can appear in Perplexity's search results. It does not state in so many words that PerplexityBot obeys every robots.txt rule, so treat the recommendation to allow it as the operative guidance rather than a guarantee of compliance.

Can I block Perplexity-User with robots.txt?

Perplexity's own documentation says Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt rules, because the fetch was directly requested by a user. Blocking it reliably needs a firewall or server level rule rather than a robots.txt entry.

How do I verify a request really came from Perplexity?

Perplexity publishes separate IP address JSON files for PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. Compare the IP address in your server logs against the current list rather than trusting the user agent string alone, since a user agent can be spoofed.

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Sources: Perplexity, Bots documentation · PerplexityBot IP list · Perplexity-User IP list