Claude-SearchBot vs Perplexity-User

Claude-SearchBot and Perplexity-User compared on 9 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	Claude-SearchBot	Perplexity-User	Comparison
cites_sources	not_documented	yes	different
honours_crawl_delay	yes	not_documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	search	user_fetch	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	no	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	yes	not_documented	different
user_agent_string_full	not_documented	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	Claude-SearchBot statement	Perplexity-User statement
cites_sources	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot.	Perplexity includes a link to each page that Perplexity-User visits in the Perplexity response.
honours_crawl_delay	Claude-SearchBot respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when crawling domains.	Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
purpose_documented	Claude-SearchBot analyses online content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude search responses.	Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
respects_robots_txt	Claude-SearchBot honours industry standard robots.txt directives that signal do not crawl.	Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Anthropic separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: Claude-SearchBot for search and ClaudeBot for training.	Perplexity does not document Perplexity-User as a search or training opt-out token.
user_agent_string_full	Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot.	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).