# 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). |

## Sources

- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
- https://openai.com/searchbot.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/oai-searchbot
- https://www.perplexity.ai/perplexity-user.json