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Perplexity

Perplexity-User

AI answersPublished CIDRsVerified July 2026

What it is

Perplexity-User visits a URL as part of a specific user action and may ignore robots.txt because the fetch is user initiated. Aiola classifies it as AI answers because access happens on demand.

In Aiola's taxonomy, AI answers means fetched to answer a user's question now.

User agent

Look for the match token inside the complete HTTP User-Agent header. Tokens can be spoofed, so use the network checks below for authentication.

Full example User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)
Case-insensitive match token
Perplexity-User

Official IP ranges

Perplexity publishes an official JSON feed. This cached snapshot contains 4 CIDR prefixes, last fetched 2026-07-11. Open the live source ↗

Perplexity-User CIDRs — snapshot fetched 2026-07-11
18.97.21.0/30
18.97.43.80/29
34.193.163.52/32
44.208.221.197/32

Verify authenticity

Start with the source IP recorded by your trusted edge or server, not an untrusted forwarded header.

Test one CIDR in Python (replace REQUEST_IP)
python3 -c 'import ipaddress; print(ipaddress.ip_address("REQUEST_IP") in ipaddress.ip_network("18.97.21.0/30"))'
Reverse- and forward-DNS double lookup
host REQUEST_IP
# Confirm the hostname ends in an official suffix
host RETURNED_HOSTNAME
# The forward lookup must return REQUEST_IP

For production checks, test against every current prefix in the vendor feed. Re-fetch feeds regularly: a July 2026 snapshot is evidence of publication, not a permanent firewall list.

Control it with robots.txt

Perplexity-User is user-triggered. Perplexity's controls may differ from automated crawling, so do not assume a robots.txt block is an authentication boundary.

Allow Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /
Block Perplexity-User
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /

Read Perplexity's official crawler documentation ↗

Track it

Aiola tracks this crawler on your site — crawls, pages, trends. See when Perplexity-User arrives, which URLs it requests, and how activity changes over time.

Explore Aiola Analytics

FAQ

What is Perplexity-User?

Perplexity-User visits a URL as part of a specific user action and may ignore robots.txt because the fetch is user initiated. Aiola classifies it as AI answers because access happens on demand.

What user-agent token identifies Perplexity-User?

Match the case-insensitive token “Perplexity-User” in the User-Agent header. A matching header alone does not authenticate the sender.

Can I verify Perplexity-User by IP address?

Perplexity publishes a JSON feed, and this page snapshots 4 CIDR prefixes fetched on 2026-07-11. Match the source IP against the current vendor feed before trusting it.

Can robots.txt block Perplexity-User?

Perplexity-User is user-triggered. Perplexity's controls may differ from automated crawling, so do not assume a robots.txt block is an authentication boundary. Use the specific “Perplexity-User” group when you want a rule for this identity without changing rules for every crawler.

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