Rattlesnakes By Mail

Bingbot vs Perplexity-User

Bingbot and Perplexity-User compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-14.

Field	Bingbot	Perplexity-User	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
follows_noarchive	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	yes	not_documented	different
opt_out_mechanism	yes	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	yes	user_fetch	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	no	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	no	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Bingbot statement	Perplexity-User statement
follows_noarchive	Bingbot excludes noarchive-tagged content from Copilot and Chat answers and from generative AI training data.	not documented
honours_crawl_delay	Microsoft states that a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt always takes precedence over Bing Webmaster Tools crawl control settings for Bingbot.	Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
opt_out_mechanism	Microsoft lets publishers block Bingbot content from Copilot answers and AI training using noarchive and nocache tags.	not documented
purpose_documented	Bingbot serves as Microsoft's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's daily web crawling.	Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
respects_robots_txt	Bingbot honors robots.txt directives and other Microsoft-supported control mechanisms that content owners set for crawling.	Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Microsoft controls Bingbot's use in AI training through meta tags rather than publishing a separate training-specific crawler token.	Perplexity does not document Perplexity-User as a search or training opt-out token.
user_agent_string_full	Bingbot sends a user agent string containing bingbot/2.0 and a link to Microsoft's bingbot.htm page.	Perplexity-User sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user).
verifiable_by_rdns	Microsoft verifies Bingbot traffic through reverse DNS lookups that resolve to hostnames ending in search.msn.com.	Perplexity does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Perplexity-User.

Sources