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.”

Instead, the AI firm claims Cloudflare confused Perplexity requests with unrelated traffic from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud browser service that Perplexity “only occasionally uses for highly specialized tasks (less than 45,000 daily requests).”

AI-powered search startup Perplexity is under fire following serious accusations from Cloudflare, a major web infrastructure firm. In a recent blog post, Cloudflare claimed that Perplexity’s systems bypassed explicit site restrictions in order to extract data, a practice that has intensified debate over the ethics of AI web crawling.