Perplexity-User
Perplexity's user-initiated fetcher. Perplexity documents that, because a human requested the page, it generally does not apply robots.txt to these fetches.
Perplexity-User/1.0Official documentation: docs.perplexity.ai
What Perplexity-User does
Perplexity-User retrieves specific URLs when a person's query requires them. Perplexity's own documentation states these user-driven fetches generally ignore robots.txt rules, on the argument that they act as the user's agent rather than as a crawler. That position makes it the clearest public test case of an unsettled question: whether an AI acting on one person's explicit request is a robot at all. Browsers were never expected to read robots.txt; Perplexity claims the same standing for its fetcher, and critics respond that a corporate fetcher at scale is not a browser.
Why it visits your site
A Perplexity user asked something your page answers; the fetch supports a live, cited response.
The bigger picture: AI user agents
User-agent fetchers are not crawlers in any meaningful sense: each request happens because a specific person asked an assistant about a specific page, right now. The pattern in your logs is the opposite of a crawl - single pages, irregular timing, no systematic walk of your archive. It is closer to a human visit with an unusual browser than to bot traffic, and treating its volume as an engagement signal - which of your pages do people ask AI about? - is more useful than treating it as load.
This category is also where the robots.txt social contract gets genuinely contested. Some operators apply robots rules to these fetches anyway; at least one documents that it does not, on the argument that an agent acting on a user's explicit request is the user's browser, not a robot. Wherever that debate settles, the practical takeaway for site owners is that policy files govern this category unevenly, and server-side visibility is how you know what is actually happening.
Should you block it?
robots.txt will not stop it by the operator's own account, so the only real lever is server-level blocking by user agent. Before pulling it, note these fetches often precede a cited answer with a clickable source - the traffic you would be refusing is high-intent, and each fetch usually represents one real person actively curious about your page.
Block via robots.txt
Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask Perplexity-User to stay away:
User-agent: Perplexity-User Disallow: /
Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.
How to see Perplexity-User traffic on your site
You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Perplexity-User request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because Perplexity-User doesn't run scripts.
Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Perplexity-User and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.