Learn · AI crawlers
What is PerplexityBot? And what is Perplexity-User?
By Cloute · Published October 1, 2026
The short answer
PerplexityBot is the crawler Perplexity uses to surface and link websites in its search results. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User is a separate agent that visits pages when a user asks Perplexity a question.
PerplexityBot visits in Cloute's server logs of local business pages in 2026
What does PerplexityBot do?
Perplexity says PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity" and that "it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." Perplexity recommends allowing it in robots.txt so a site can appear in its search results.
What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity says Perplexity-User supports user actions: when someone asks Perplexity a question, it may visit web pages to give an accurate answer with linked citations. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or to collect content for training, and that because a user started the fetch, it "generally ignores robots.txt rules."
What are their user agents?
| Agent | User agent string | robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| PerplexityBot | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) | Token PerplexityBot. Perplexity recommends allowing it. |
| Perplexity-User | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) | Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, since a user initiated it. |
Should a local business allow PerplexityBot?
Yes, if it wants to be found on Perplexity. Blocking PerplexityBot does not protect content from model training, because Perplexity says it is not a training crawler; it only keeps the site out of Perplexity's search results. Across AI answers about local businesses, Perplexity named a business 81.3% of the time when it had read one of the business's own pages, and 16.7% when it had not.
- User-agent: PerplexityBot
- Allow: /
Like the other AI crawlers, it does not run JavaScript. A page whose text only appears after scripts load looks empty to it, so the content should be in the HTML the server sends. Cloute found its own website was invisible to AI crawlers for exactly this reason in 2026, and fixed it.
Read next
Research: 80,000+ AI crawler visits to local business websites What is ClaudeBot? (and Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot) What is OAI-SearchBot? AI crawlers: the complete list for 2026 Should a local business block AI crawlers?Questions people ask
Does PerplexityBot train AI models?
Perplexity says it does not. It describes PerplexityBot as a search crawler that surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's results.
Does Perplexity-User follow robots.txt?
Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt rules, because the fetch is initiated by a user asking a question.
How often does PerplexityBot visit local business websites?
It made 4,160 visits in Cloute's server logs of local business pages in 2026.
About Cloute. Cloute is an AI visibility company for local businesses. It measures how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews recommend a business against its local competitors, and works every month to move it to the top.