Perplexity
Perplexity-User
Fetches a page Perplexity is about to cite in an answer.
When you see it: Perplexity is answering someone's question and your page is one of the sources it opened.
How we check it is really Perplexity
- 01
The user agent has to contain Perplexity-User.
- 02
The address is compared against Perplexity's published ranges, which we refetch every six hours.
Perplexity publishes no reverse DNS record, so an address outside the list is recorded as unverified rather than as a forgery — the list may simply be behind.
What each result means
- verified
- The address matched Perplexity's own published records. This really was them.
- unverified
- We could not confirm it, and that is all it means. The operator may publish nothing to check against, a published list may be behind the addresses actually in use, or DNS may simply have been slow. It is not an accusation.
- spoofed
- The address belongs to somebody else — its own reverse DNS record resolves to a different owner. That is positive evidence of a forgery rather than a failure to find evidence, which is why it is reported as its own result and never folded into the row above.
The distinction costs nothing to make and is the reason these numbers can be shown to someone who will ask where they came from. A report that cannot separate “we do not know” from “this was faked” invites exactly one question it cannot answer.
The lists this is checked against
Published by Perplexity and refetched every six hours. Open them; they are the same files we read.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Token
- Perplexity-User
- Counted as
- AI assistant
- Verification
- Published IP ranges
- Runs JavaScript
- No
- Operator docs
- Published
User agent
Perplexity-UserMatched as a token, not as a full browser string. Perplexity adds and changes the version and product text around it without notice, so a filter pinned to the whole header stops working the first time they bump a version while one matching Perplexity-User keeps working. The same string is what Perplexity names in robots.txt.
One real request
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-userPerplexity's other crawlers
Perplexity sends 2 crawlers, each with its own token and its own job. They are counted separately for that reason — the tokens differ by a few characters and what the fetch means does not, so folding them into one operator row would let indexing look like AI interest.
| Token | Counted as | Verification | What it fetches for |
|---|---|---|---|
Perplexity-Userthis page | AI answers | Published IP ranges | Fetches a page Perplexity is about to cite in an answer. |
| PerplexityBot | Indexing | User agent only | Keeps Perplexity's search index fresh. It is an index, not training. |
Your analytics never mentioned Perplexity-User because it cannot see it.
This crawler takes your HTML and leaves without running a line of JavaScript, so a browser tag records nothing. TrueStat reads it server-side, checks the address, and shows you which pages it fetched — including the ones that returned a 404.