Perplexity-User: Robots.txt & Crawl Policy Reference

AI Summary: Perplexity-User is an on-demand, user-triggered crawler operated by Perplexity AI. It is used exclusively when a user asks Perplexity to read or summarize a specific webpage, and it is not used for background indexing or AI model training.

Role and policy boundary

Perplexity-User serves as a live browsing agent. When a user pastes a URL into Perplexity or clicks a source link, this User-Agent makes the HTTP request to fetch the content in real-time. Perplexity explicitly states this bot is not used to collect content for training their foundation models, distinguishing it from their background crawler, PerplexityBot.

A robots rule is a declaration of intent; it does not replace authentication, authorization, or rate limiting. Start with a dedicated group:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /internal/

To stop access for the entire site, use:

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Avoid assuming that User-agent: * expresses the same business intent. A wildcard can affect assistant and training crawlers too, and it makes later audits harder because the source of the decision is less specific.

Layered verification

Verify the same URL through each control plane instead of assuming that one green signal represents the whole request path. Compare the bot-specific robots group, the page-level metadata, and the response headers captured at the public edge.

To control Perplexity-User, target its specific User-Agent in your robots.txt. Blocking it means Perplexity will not be able to read your pages when explicitly prompted by users. Note that there have been industry reports of Perplexity allegedly bypassing robots.txt or spoofing User-Agents in the past, so defense-in-depth is recommended if strict blocking is required.

The Policy Engine evaluates the selected user-agent, path scope, and the other supplied layers independently. It can therefore explain why a bot is allowed while another is blocked, rather than returning one blended website score.

Page-level directives can still override the intended outcome for indexing:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

If a response uses these tags, the report marks the result as blocked or conflicting even if the crawler-specific robots group is permissive. This is especially important for canonical pages served through an edge cache where headers may differ from the origin response.

WAF and Nginx remediation examples

If you need to strictly block Perplexity's user-triggered fetches at the network layer, you can use a WAF rule:

{
  "description": "Block Perplexity User Fetcher",
  "expression": "lower(http.user_agent) contains \"perplexity-user\"",
  "action": "block"
}

Use your platform's actual middleware response pattern rather than copying this simplified example without review. Never place a secret, verification token, or internal policy identifier in a public response header.

map $http_user_agent $block_perplexity_user_private {
    default 0;
    ~*perplexity-user 1;
}

server {
    location ~ ^/(admin|account|private|licensed|internal|api)/ {
        if ($block_perplexity_user_private) { return 403; }
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Review checklist

Use this checklist after every policy change and after a CDN or WAF migration. Record the request URL, User-Agent, HTTP status, final redirect, and the exact evidence used to reach the decision.

Verify that the dedicated group appears before relying on a wildcard, test a representative public and private path, and compare live response headers with robots.txt. Keep the policy close to the content owner's intent and record whether the site wants discovery, citation, or no access at all.

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