Perplexity-User
Perplexity documents Perplexity-User as a fetch made because a person asked for a page. It is a crawler User-Agent, not a Chrome referrer.
- Operator
- Perplexity
- Motif family
- perplexity
- Motif class
- User-requested fetch
- In Motif classifier
- Yes
- robots.txt
- Often a user-initiated fetch; do not assume robots.txt applies
- Executes JavaScript
- No
- Verified in Motif
- Vendor docs exist. Motif does not check source IPs
What Motif will and will not claim
Motif classifies Perplexity-User as family perplexity, class user. A browser pageview with a perplexity.ai referrer is still the human channel.
Revenue
Do not mix Perplexity-User into visitor counts. Stripe joins the human first touch only.
Vendor documentation
Start with the vendor page at https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots. Motif stores the controlled token from a self-reported User-Agent.
Perplexity-User User-Agent example
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Perplexity-User/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexity-user)Allow Perplexity-User in robots.txt
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Allow: /Block Perplexity-User in robots.txt
User-agent: Perplexity-User
Disallow: /Does Perplexity-User count as a visit in Motif?
No. If Perplexity-User hits the Motif tracker or collector it increments AI crawlers. It does not create a visitor and cannot win a recommendation.
Will Motif show Perplexity-User on my HTML pages?
Only if that client requested /m.js or POST /v1/events. HTML-only crawls of the origin never reach Motif. Saying otherwise would be a product lie.
Should I block Perplexity-User?
User-requested fetchers often ignore robots.txt because a person asked for the page. Blocking them in robots.txt may do nothing. They are still not visitors in Motif.