Abstract: From the view of engineering seismology, the near-fault records with acceleration pulses are the critical causation to structural damage. Thusly, the identification of pulse-like records is essential for seismic design. Anomaly detection is applied to extract pulse waveform preliminarily in the detection, and structural performance serves as the criterion to identify acceleration pulse-like ground motion. A total of 2390 records with rupture distance less than 60 km and moment magnitude exceed 5.5 are collected from the NGA-West2 database, and the structural performance of 35 modeling structures in Hazus is analyzed by the pushover analysis method. Acceleration pulse-like ground motion has a significant amplification effect on structures with fundamental period T_e less than 1 s. The central frequency of acceleration pulse-like motions mainly concentrates above 1 Hz. The method proposed can effectively identify the irregular pulse waveform in the original ground motion and the structural performance-based criterion is more applicable in earthquake engineering.