Perplexity accused of bypassing blocks to secretly scrape websites, says Cloudflare
Perplexity, however, has pushed back against the claims, calling them a 'sales pitch' and arguing that Cloudflare fundamentally misunderstands how modern AI assistants work.
In a detailed rebuttal shared by the company, Perplexity argued that it does not engage in traditional web crawling to build massive data sets. Instead, it said, its platform uses 'user-driven agents' that fetch content only when a person asks a question requiring real-time information.'When Perplexity fetches a webpage, it's because a user asked a specific question,' the company explained, insisting that the fetched data is not stored or used for training AI models.Perplexity also accused Cloudflare of misattributing automated traffic from a third-party service, BrowserBase, to its own systems. It claimed only a small fraction of traffic came from this service and denied using it for general web scraping. 'This is a basic traffic analysis failure,' Perplexity said, accusing Cloudflare of publishing inaccurate diagrams and misleading information.The dispute highlights growing tensions between AI companies that rely on open web data and website operators seeking to control how their content is used. As AI tools become more sophisticated and reliant on real-time information, the line between helpful digital assistant and unwanted bot has become increasingly blurred.Cloudflare has not responded to Perplexity's latest statements, and the controversy is likely to fuel further discussion on the need for clearer guidelines around AI data access and ethical web scraping.- Ends
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