Perplexity-User
Perplexity · User-action fetcher
What it does
Perplexity-User fetches a page because a user asked about that specific link. Fetches a page when a Perplexity user opens or asks about a specific link.
It does not execute JavaScript. Whatever your server returns in the initial HTML response is the entire page as far as Perplexity-User is concerned — if your content is rendered client-side, this crawler reads an empty container.
Should you block Perplexity-User?
Blocking it means that when someone pastes your URL and asks what it says, the assistant cannot read it and says so. This is the most direct visibility loss of the three.
When someone opens your link from within Perplexity or asks about it directly, the page cannot be read. The user sees a failure rather than your content.
To allow it
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /To block it
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Put the rule in your robots.txt at the site root. A group that names Perplexity-User explicitly takes precedence over your User-agent: * group, so naming it is how you make your intent survive later edits to the wildcard rules.
Verifying a real Perplexity-User request
Check the source IP against Perplexity's published ranges. As a user-action fetcher, it arrives as individual requests triggered by a person, not as a scheduled crawl.
The mistake people make
Grouping it with PerplexityBot in a single Disallow. The indexing crawler and the user fetcher serve different moments in the same journey, and blocking both closes the loop twice.
Perplexity's other crawlers
- PerplexityBotBuilds the Perplexity index. Blocking it removes you from Perplexity citations.
Can Perplexity-User reach your site?
The free scan parses your robots.txt, evaluates every AI crawler against it, and tells you how much of a page Perplexity-User would actually come away with.
Run the free scan