# Claude-User vs PerplexityBot

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

| Field | Claude-User | PerplexityBot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not_documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | yes | not_documented | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | user_fetch | search | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | not_documented | same |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | not_documented | not_documented | same |
| user_agent_string_full | not_documented | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot) | different |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | no | not documented | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | not_documented | not_documented | same |

## Differences

| Field | Claude-User statement | PerplexityBot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User. | Perplexity links to the websites that PerplexityBot surfaces in Perplexity search results. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Claude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages. | Perplexity does not publish whether PerplexityBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive. |
| purpose_documented | Claude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude. | PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results. |
| user_agent_string_full | Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-User. | PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot). |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | Anthropic 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

- 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/perplexitybot.json