OAI-SearchBot vs Perplexity-User

OAI-SearchBot and Perplexity-User compared on 10 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

Field	OAI-SearchBot	Perplexity-User	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	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	Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot	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	OAI-SearchBot statement	Perplexity-User statement
observed_arrival_before_sitemap	OAI-SearchBot first requested Rattlesnakes By Mail at 2026-09-13T21:41:14Z, before the Rattlesnakes By Mail sitemap was submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools shortly before 2026-09-15T08:38Z and to Google Search Console at 2026-09-15T09:00Z. OAI-SearchBot made 3 requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z, all 3 to /robots.txt.	not documented
purpose_documented	OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in search results in ChatGPT search features.	Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
respects_robots_txt	OAI-SearchBot honours robots.txt opt-outs set for the OAI-SearchBot token.	Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
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	OAI-SearchBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/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).