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

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.”

Internet security giant Cloudfare says Perplexity deployed "stealth crawlers" to evade restrictions and scrape content from sites.