What is Perplexity-User?
Perplexity-User is the fetcher Perplexity uses to visit a web page when a user asks a question, so it can support the answer and link the page. According to Perplexity, it does not crawl the web and does not collect training data.
Perplexity-User is not a crawler in the classic sense. It does not work through a list of pages but fetches the one page needed for a specific question, at the moment someone searches in Perplexity.
The key difference from PerplexityBot is stated verbatim in the documentation: because a user requested the fetch, this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules. A robots.txt block therefore does not reliably stop Perplexity from reading your page for an answer.
If you really want to prevent access, you can only do it at server level, for example through the published IP addresses. If you want to be cited as a source instead, make sure your firewall does not reject these requests by accident.
What it means for your website
Search your server logs for Perplexity-User. If you see fetches with status code 200, your page is being read for answers. If the fetch gets an error, review your firewall rules. The deeploupe GPTBot check does not test Perplexity-User, neither in robots.txt nor live; your logs are the only reliable source here. Compare the requests with the published IP addresses so you can tell genuine fetches from imitators.
Sources
Terms help you understand. Whether AI crawlers can reach your site is something you measure.
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