Perplexity-User
AI assistant (user-triggered)Perplexity fetching a page because a user asked about it.
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User fetches pages in response to a specific user query — distinct from PerplexityBot's background indexing. Perplexity documents that these user-triggered fetches may ignore robots.txt precisely because a human explicitly requested the page.
Fact sheet
- Operator
- Perplexity
- robots.txt token
- Perplexity-User
- Honors robots.txt
- Unclear / inconsistent
- Executes JavaScript
- No — invisible to browser analytics
- Identity verifiable by IP
- Yes — vendor publishes IP ranges (we verify every visit)
- Official documentation
- Perplexity docs ↗
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user
User-agent strings are free to fake — any scraper can claim to be Perplexity-User. That's why VisitorType checks every claimed Perplexity-User visit against Perplexity's published IP ranges and downgrades impostors to plain bots.
Allow or block via robots.txt
# Block Perplexity-User User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: / # Or allow it explicitly User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: /
Should you block Perplexity-User?
robots.txt may not stop it (user-triggered fetchers generally answer to the user, not the crawl policy). If you must control it, do it at the edge by verified IP — but as with all assistant fetches, these are live humans researching you.
Is Perplexity-User reading your site?
Perplexity-Usernever runs JavaScript, so GA4 can't see it. VisitorType's server-side detection can — with per-page counts and IP-verified identity.
Measure it free