Rattlesnakes By Mail

OAI-AdsBot vs Perplexity-User

OAI-AdsBot and Perplexity-User compared on 10 documented fields, from 17 claims, last verified 2026-09-13.

How many of the compared fields have the same answer for both crawlers, and how many differ.

OAI-AdsBot and Perplexity-User, fields comparedOAI-AdsBot and Perplexity-User, fields compared. Different is the largest with 6 fields, out of 10 fields in total.Same: 4 fieldsSame4Different: 6 fieldsDifferent6
OAI-AdsBot and Perplexity-User, fields compared. Different is the largest with 6 fields, out of 10 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldOAI-AdsBotPerplexity-UserComparison
cites_sourcesnot documentedyesdifferent
honours_crawl_delaynot_documentednot_documentedsame
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedadsuser_fetchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot documentednot_documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtnot_documentednodifferent
scope_of_crawlinglimited to submitted ad landing pagesnot documenteddifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensnot_documentednot_documentedsame
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbotMozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)different
verifiable_by_rdnsnot_documentednot_documentedsame

Differences

FieldOAI-AdsBot statementPerplexity-User statement
cites_sourcesnot documentedPerplexity includes a link to each page that Perplexity-User visits in the Perplexity response.
purpose_documentedOAI-AdsBot visits landing pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT to check compliance with OpenAI policies.Perplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.
reads_llms_txtnot documentedPerplexity does not publish whether Perplexity-User reads llms.txt files.
respects_robots_txtOpenAI does not publish whether OAI-AdsBot honours robots.txt disallow rules.Perplexity-User ignores robots.txt rules because a user requests each Perplexity-User fetch.
scope_of_crawlingOAI-AdsBot visits only pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT.not documented
user_agent_string_fullOAI-AdsBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-AdsBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/adsbot.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