Perplexity-User

Perplexity-User is a clear example of a broader shift AEO has to plan for: an increasing share of bot traffic is really a person, mediated by an AI, and the old rules of bot management were not written for that. Robots.txt cannot reliably wave these fetches away, and Perplexity says so plainly, which moves the real decision to your firewall and bot-protection layer. Configure those to challenge or block user-action agents and the failure mode is brutal: a genuinely interested buyer asks about you, the engine cannot read your page, and the answer gets built from whatever third-party sources remain, or from a rival who loads cleanly. Watching Perplexity-User hits in your server logs, alongside ChatGPT-User, gives you a live, unfakeable measure of how often AI conversations are actually reaching for your site, which no analytics dashboard can show you.