Kuldeep Paul

User-triggered fetch · Perplexity AI

Perplexity-User

Fetches pages on behalf of users. Perplexity documents that because a user initiated the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.

Compiled by · Updated Oct 29, 2026

8.1%of top sites fully block Perplexity-User
464sites blocking, of 5,701 with robots.txt
78of the top 1,000 block it
Operator
Perplexity AI
Purpose
User-triggered fetch
Used for
Perplexity, Comet
Obeys robots.txt
No
robots.txt token
Perplexity-User
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
IP list
www.perplexity.com/perplexity-user.json
Official docs
docs.perplexity.ai
Feeds
Perplexity, Comet

Block Perplexity-User in robots.txt

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Blocking a search or user-triggered bot removes your pages from that assistant's answers. To opt out of model training only, block the operator's training crawler instead.

Well-known sites that block Perplexity-User

amazon.com #30, amazonvideo.com #85, msn.com #92, nytimes.com #163, cnn.com #195, bbc.com #216, sciencedirect.com #224, bbc.co.uk #236, weibo.com #318, amazon.co.uk #326, amazon.de #387, cnbc.com #474, amazon.co.jp #490, uol.com.br #535, ft.com #552, wired.com #570, usatoday.com #617, dailymail.com #619, endpoints.news #626, telegraph.co.uk #629, amazon.fr #632, amazon.ca #633, elpais.com #674, amazon.in #676

Ranks from the Tranco list. Full per-site data in the robots.txt study.

Other Perplexity AI bots

PerplexityBot (ai search index)

Questions

What is Perplexity-User?

Perplexity-User is a user-triggered fetch bot operated by Perplexity AI, used for Perplexity, Comet. Fetches pages on behalf of users. Perplexity documents that because a user initiated the fetch, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.

How do I block Perplexity-User?

Add "User-agent: Perplexity-User" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of each host you want to protect. Perplexity-User is reported not to honour robots.txt, so a firewall or bot-management rule is more reliable.

Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?

Not reliably. Perplexity-User is documented or widely reported as ignoring robots.txt.

How many websites block Perplexity-User?

In a Oct 29, 2026 analysis of the top 10,000 websites by Kuldeep Paul, 8.1% of sites with a robots.txt file fully disallowed Perplexity-User.

Analysis using this data

  1. Who blocks AI crawlers? What 10,000 robots.txt files revealPublishers block training, not answers; half of all blocklists leak; Cloudflare writes the most common AI policy.
  2. The opt-out asymmetry: you can block the small AI engines, not the big oneThe AI surfaces with the most users are the ones publishers can't refuse and can't measure.

← All AI crawlers

How to cite this data

This dataset is free to use, including commercially, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The one rule is attribution:

  1. Credit the source as “Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc” wherever you use a figure, chart or table from it.
  2. Link to this page (https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user), not to the download file, so readers can check the source of every number.
  3. Include the date. These figures change; say “as of Oct 29, 2026” or link to the version you used.
  4. Mark changes. If you filter, recalculate or chart the data yourself, say so (“analysis based on data from…”).
  5. Cite the original source for single figures when you quote one reported number; it is linked in every row.

In running text: according to Kuldeep Paul's Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory (kuldeep.cc). More in the methodology.

APA

Paul, K. (2026). Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory [Data set]. kuldeep.cc. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user

MLA

Paul, Kuldeep. "Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory." kuldeep.cc, 29 October 2026, https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user.

Chicago

Paul, Kuldeep. 2026. "Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory." Dataset. kuldeep.cc. Updated Oct 29, 2026. https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user.

BibTeX

@misc{paul2026perplexityuser, author = {Paul, Kuldeep}, title = {Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user}}, note = {Dataset, CC BY 4.0, updated 2026-10-29} }

HTML link

<a href="https://kuldeep.cc/data/ai-search/crawlers/perplexity-user">Perplexity-User — AI crawler directory</a> (data: Kuldeep Paul, kuldeep.cc)