Rattlesnakes By Mail

Claude-User vs Perplexity-User

Claude-User and Perplexity-User compared on 10 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

FieldClaude-UserPerplexity-UserComparison
cites_sourcesnot_documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delayyesnot_documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documenteduser_fetchuser_fetchsame
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot_documentedsame
respects_robots_txtyesnodifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensnot_documentednot_documentedsame
user_agent_string_fullnot_documentedMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)different
user_fetch_exception_documentednonot documenteddifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsnot_documentednot_documentedsame

Differences

FieldClaude-User statementPerplexity-User statement
cites_sourcesAnthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User.Perplexity includes a link to each page that Perplexity-User visits in the Perplexity response.
honours_crawl_delayClaude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages.Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
respects_robots_txtClaude-User 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.
user_agent_string_fullAnthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-User.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).
user_fetch_exception_documentedAnthropic applies the same robots.txt statement to Claude-User as to ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot and documents no exception for user-initiated fetches.not documented

Sources