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 Perplexity of using stealth crawlers to bypass site restrictions, triggering fresh concerns over how AI firms access web content.

Perplexity defends its AI assistants against Cloudflare's claims, arguing that they are not web crawlers but user-triggered agents.