PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User
PerplexityBot is the automatic search crawler; Perplexity-User retrieves pages in response to user requests. Perplexity publishes separate IP ranges for both.
PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User
Perplexity separates automatic search discovery from user-requested retrieval: PerplexityBot is the search crawler, while Perplexity-User is a user-triggered fetcher that generally ignores robots.txt.
Read this alongside Build search systems you can verify.
Perplexity documents two web-access identities. PerplexityBot automatically gathers and indexes information so websites can surface and be linked in Perplexity search results. Perplexity-User fetches pages in response to a person’s question.
Perplexity explicitly says PerplexityBot is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. It also says Perplexity-User is not used for web crawling or foundation-model training. Those statements make the pair different from a search-versus-training split such as OAI-SearchBot versus GPTBot.
Scope and assumptions
Perplexity states that crawler-policy changes can take time and that current IP lists should be treated as the source of truth. This article reflects documentation checked September 23, 2026. A fetch does not prove ranking, citation, or training use.
- Automatic search crawler
- PERPLEXITYBOT
- User-triggered fetcher
- PERPLEXITY-USER
- Training use of PerplexityBot
- NO, PER DOCS
- Published IP lists
- 2
PerplexityBot is the search-discovery crawler
Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt and allowing its published IP ranges if a publisher wants the site to appear in Perplexity search results. The crawler has its own full User-Agent string and current JSON IP source.
Blocking the token expresses an automatic crawling preference. A separate WAF block can still prevent access even when robots.txt permits it.
Perplexity-User is a user-triggered fetcher
Perplexity says Perplexity-User supports actions initiated by users and may visit a page to answer a question and include a link in the response. Because a user requested the fetch, the documentation says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt.
That makes it operationally different from the automatic search crawler. A site that needs strict access control cannot rely on robots.txt to protect private paths from user-triggered fetch mechanisms; authentication belongs at the application or edge layer.
Perplexity recommends User-Agent plus IP checks at the WAF
The current documentation gives explicit WAF guidance: combine User-Agent conditions with source IPs from Perplexity’s official JSON endpoints. It advises fetching those current ranges rather than assuming a static list.
This is also a sound analytics rule. If a request claims PerplexityBot but comes from an unrelated network, classify it as spoofed or unverified instead of contaminating crawler counts.
The publisher decision is search visibility versus user retrieval
For automatic Perplexity discovery, the relevant token is PerplexityBot. For a user asking Perplexity to retrieve a page, the relevant identity is Perplexity-User. The two requests may hit the same URL but represent different product flows.
Keep the access evidence separate from answer-system performance. Server logs can establish a request and response; they cannot establish why an answer cited or did not cite the page.
Perplexity exposes two different access paths
Use PerplexityBot when reasoning about automatic Search visibility and Perplexity-User when reasoning about user-triggered retrieval. Verify either identity with the published IP endpoints plus the User-Agent instead of trusting the header alone.
Sources
- Perplexity — crawler and user-agent documentation
Verified Sep 23, 2026
Supporting material
- AI crawler robots.txt policy guide
Copy-ready policy patterns for separating search discovery, training crawlers, and user-triggered fetchers.
- robots.txt access-control boundary
Why crawler policy is not authentication or authorization, with RFC 9309 context.