# 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). |

## Sources

- https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
- https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json