Rattlesnakes By Mail

Perplexity-User vs PerplexityBot

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

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

Perplexity-User and PerplexityBot, fields comparedPerplexity-User and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Same is the largest with 6 fields, out of 9 fields in total.Same: 6 fieldsSame6Different: 3 fieldsDifferent3
Perplexity-User and PerplexityBot, fields compared. Same is the largest with 6 fields, out of 9 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldPerplexity-UserPerplexityBotComparison
cites_sourcesyesyessame
honours_crawl_delaynot_documentednot_documentedsame
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documenteduser_fetchsearchdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot_documentedsame
respects_robots_txtnoyesdifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensnot_documentednot_documentedsame
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/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_rdnsnot_documentednot_documentedsame

Differences

FieldPerplexity-User statementPerplexityBot statement
purpose_documentedPerplexity-User visits web pages to answer questions that users ask Perplexity.PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
respects_robots_txtPerplexity-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_fullPerplexity-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).

Sources