Cloudflare has since removed Perplexity's bots from its list of verified bots and implemented new AI-blocking techniques.

Responding to Cloudflare's analysis and testing, Perplexity declared that analysis was technically flawed and that it misattributed unrelated traffic. Perplexity has also asserted its traffic is user-driven, not stealth scraping or malicious crawling, suggesting that Cloudflare has misunderstood modern AI assistant behavior.

To test this, Cloudflare says it created new domains with similar restrictions against Perplexity’s AI scrapers. It found that the startup will first attempt to access the sites by identifying itself as the names of its crawlers: “PerplexityBot” or “Perplexity-User.”

Cloudflare is accusing the AI-powered answer engine Perplexity of using "stealth crawling behavior" to scrape content from websites.

Cloudflare claims the AI startup is bypassing robots.txt restrictions to scrape content, potentially exposing Perplexity to lawsuits from publishers like Dow Jones and the BBC.

First, Cloudflare accused the AI company of bypassing no-crawl directives. Now Perplexity says Cloudflare has it all wrong.

AI search biz insists its content capture and summarization is okay because someone asked for it AI search biz Perplexity claims that Cloudflare has mischaracterized its site crawlers as malicious bots and that the content delivery network made technical errors in its analysis of Perplexity's operations.