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

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from AI Assistants

Top Visited Website Categories

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?

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.

# robots.txt
# This should block Perplexity-User

User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

References

• https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots