Perplexity-User vs PerplexityBot

Perplexity-User and PerplexityBot compared on 9 documented fields, from 18 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

Field	Perplexity-User	PerplexityBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	yes	same
honours_crawl_delay	not_documented	not_documented	same
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	user_fetch	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	no	yes	different
separate_search_and_training_tokens	not_documented	not_documented	same
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)	Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)	different
verifiable_by_rdns	not_documented	not_documented	same

Differences

Field	Perplexity-User statement	PerplexityBot statement
purpose_documented	Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.	PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
respects_robots_txt	Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.	PerplexityBot honours robots.txt rules that webmasters set for the PerplexityBot token.
user_agent_string_full	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).	PerplexityBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot).