Perplexity · AI answers

Perplexity-User

Identify Perplexity-User by its user agent. Check request identity, review robots.txt controls and track visits in Aiola Analytics.

Download AiolaAI crawler directory

Key facts

User-agent token: Perplexity-User
AI answers: Fetched to answer a user's question now.
Perplexity publishes official IP ranges; verify requests against them.

What Perplexity-User 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.

Perplexity-User 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 IP range list. This cached snapshot contains 4 CIDR prefixes, last fetched 2026-10-23. Open the live source

Official IP range snapshot
18.97.21.0/30
18.97.43.80/29
34.193.163.52/32
44.208.221.197/32

Verify a Perplexity-User request

For Perplexity-User, compare the source IP from your trusted edge or server against Perplexity’s current published prefixes.

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"))'

Test every current prefix in the vendor feed and re-fetch it regularly. This cached snapshot is evidence of publication, not a permanent firewall list.

Control Perplexity-User 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 official crawler documentation

Aiola Analytics

See every Perplexity-User visit on your site

Aiola tracks 70 AI, search and link-preview crawlers next to your human traffic. See when Perplexity-User arrives, which pages it requests and how that changes over time. Hosted Analytics needs Pro or a trial.

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Aiola Analytics showing AI crawler visits by bot and page

Common questions

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