Checks / AI crawler access
robots.txt keeps Perplexity-User out of your home page and most of the site
Perplexity-User may read only the paths robots.txt allows for it. Your home page and the rest of the site stay closed to it, so it cannot cite them.
robots_partial_perplexity_user · AI crawler access · Error
What triggers it
robots.txt does not let Perplexity-User fetch your home page, but leaves some other paths open for it; the finding names the first three.
What to change
Remove the Disallow: / rule for Perplexity-User in robots.txt, or add Allow rules for the other paths you want read.
Example
Lines that allow Perplexity-User in robots.txt:
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /How to confirm the fix
- Open https://example.com/robots.txt: the group that names Perplexity-User (or the * group, if none does) leaves most of the site open, the home page included
- Run a new crawl: the AI crawler table no longer reports Perplexity-User as mostly blocked
About Perplexity-User
Perplexity-User is Perplexity's user-action fetcher: when a user asks a question, it may visit a page to answer accurately and link to it. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or for training AI models, and that it generally ignores robots.txt rules because a user requested the fetch.
PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity search results, while Perplexity-User fetches a page when a user's question needs it and generally ignores robots.txt.
Perplexity publishes the Perplexity-User IP addresses as a JSON file and says to use it as the source of truth for allow rules, combined with the user-agent string.
Job: User-triggered fetch. Follows robots.txt: Generally not. Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules because a user requested the fetch..
Perplexity-User: operator, user-agent string and address list
How common it is
We have not measured how common this is on a sample of sites. Counts appear here when a study covers it.
About this check
| Check ID | robots_partial_perplexity_user |
|---|---|
| Report section | AI crawler access |
| Severity | Error |
| How it is decided | Measured: read directly from the page or the server's response. |
| Added | Before 19 Oct 2026 (versions 1 and 2), or a site-wide check with no version date yet |
| Status | Measured in every report |
| Report gives the code | Yes, one block for the site |
Settings by platform
For robots.txt, where the setting lives differs by platform. Our guides cover 13 of them: AI crawler settings by platform.
Related checks
- robots.txt keeps Claude-User out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps OAI-SearchBot out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt keeps PerplexityBot out of your home page and most of the site
- robots.txt blocks Perplexity-User
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