User-triggered fetch
Perplexity-User: what it is.
Perplexity-User is the agent Perplexity uses to support user actions, such as visiting a page when a person asks a question.
Identity
- Operator: Perplexity
- User-agent token:
Perplexity-User - robots.txt token:
Perplexity-User - In Geordy's crawler directory: Fetches one page because a Perplexity user opened a source. See the full list.
What it does, per Perplexity
Perplexity says Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity, and may visit a page when a user asks a question.
Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training AI foundation models.
Perplexity says that because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules.
robots.txt
Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Perplexity's page does not print example lines, so the ones below are standard robots.txt syntax around the agent's name.
Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules, so a Disallow line is not a reliable way to stop it.
Perplexity publishes the addresses Perplexity-User uses at perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json, and prints its user-agent string, which contains Perplexity-User/1.0.
What Geordy observes
Share of eligible sites where Perplexity-User requested each Geordy-served file at least once, over the 90 days to 12 November 2026.
| Format | Evidence | Sites with a request | Median requests per site per day | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YAML | Established pattern | under 5% | 0 | Similar to others |
| RSS Feed | Established pattern | under 5% | 0 | Similar to others |
| Markdown | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
| Schema JSON (JSON-LD) | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
| OG.json | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
| LLMs.txt | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
| Humans.txt | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
| Manifest.json | Established pattern | 0% | 0 | Similar to others |
Figures are rounded and cover only sites that served the file for the whole window. Requests are to Geordy-served files, identified by user agent; a request is not evidence of use or citation. Pairs with too few independent sites are not shown. See how we measure.
Check your site
See whether your robots.txt currently allows or blocks Perplexity-User, and what else AI crawlers find on your site.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026. Every statement about what Perplexity-User does comes from the operator's own documentation: