# GPTBot vs Perplexity-User

GPTBot and Perplexity-User compared on 10 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

| Field | GPTBot | Perplexity-User | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | not_documented | not_documented | same |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | training | user_fetch | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | not_documented | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | no | different |
| robots_txt_fetch_marker | yes | not documented | different |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | yes | not_documented | different |
| user_agent_string_full | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot | 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 | GPTBot statement | Perplexity-User statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not documented | Perplexity includes a link to each page that Perplexity-User visits in the Perplexity response. |
| purpose_documented | GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models. | Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity. |
| reads_llms_txt | not documented | Perplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User reads llms.txt files. |
| respects_robots_txt | GPTBot honours robots.txt rules that webmasters set for the GPTBot token. | Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch. |
| robots_txt_fetch_marker | OpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files. | not documented |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training. | Perplexity does not document Perplexity-User as a search or training opt-out token. |
| user_agent_string_full | GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot. | 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://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
- https://openai.com/gptbot.json
- https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json