Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
Perplexity publishes the IP ranges Perplexity-User uses. A request with this user agent from any other address is not Perplexity-User. The zoo checks every visit against that list. Read Perplexity's documentation.
How to block Perplexity-User
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from Perplexity-User's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block Perplexity-User from the whole site User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Because it acts for a user, Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt.
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: Perplexity-User Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 0 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Requests that use Perplexity-User's name but fail Perplexity's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:
Nothing on record in the last 30 days.
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Questions site owners ask
Does Perplexity-User respect robots.txt?
We can't say yet. It has not fetched robots.txt here, and it has not touched a disallowed page either.
Will blocking Perplexity-User hurt my search rankings?
No. Perplexity-User isn't used by Google or Bing to rank pages. Blocking it only affects whether Perplexity collects your content.
How often does Perplexity-User visit?
Here, about 0 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.