Cloudflare says Perplexity evades crawl directives with stealth tactics; Perplexity calls the claims a misunderstanding – or a PR stunt.

The feud underscores the need for new standards in AI-web interaction, as bot detection tools struggle to distinguish between helpful assistants and harmful scrapers.

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.”