Perplexity-User

What is Perplexity-User?

About

Perplexity-User supports user actions within Perplexity. When users ask Perplexity a question, it might visit a web page to help provide an accurate answer and include a link to the page in its response. You can see how often Perplexity-User visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

AI assistants make one-off visits to websites based on user requests, rather than crawling the web in any automatic fashion. This allows the underlying LLM to incorporate up-to-date information outside of its training data in its answers, using a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Type

AI Assistant
Intelligently fetches content on behalf of a user

Detail

Operated By Perplexity
Last Updated 5 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

3%
3% of top websites are blocking Perplexity-User
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
Perplexity-User normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Assistants

Top Visited Website Categories

Computers and Electronics
Law and Government
Food and Drink
Science
Finance
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Robots.txt

Should I Block Perplexity-User?

Probably not. AI assistants visit websites directly on behalf of human users, so blocking them will effectively block those users. This could lead to a poor user experience and possible negative sentiment about your website. Not blocking AI assistants will allow more human users to use your website as they choose.

How Do I Block Perplexity-User?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block Perplexity-User or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user) 
# robots.txt
# This should block Perplexity-User

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

References