There’s a new conflict on the internet between Perplexity AI and Cloudflare. Where the internet infrastructure company accusing the AI search startup of using undeclared crawlers to evade website restrictions. However, Perplexity has fired back, calling the claims technically flawed and misleading.
The whole story started when Cloudflare alleged that Perplexity is bypassing websites‘ robots.txt directives and firewall blocks by rotating IPs and disguising its crawling activity behind generic browser user agents. According to Cloudflare, this “stealth crawling” enabled Perplexity to scrape content from websites that had explicitly opted out of such access.
