Cloudflare has accused AI search startup Perplexity of deliberately bypassing website restrictions to access content without permission.
According to a newly released Cloudflare report, Perplexity is allegedly disguising its web crawlers to evade blocks placed by websites that have explicitly opted out of AI scraping.
This latest accusation adds fuel to ongoing concerns about how generative AI companies like Perplexity are collecting data, especially when content owners explicitly deny permission.
Perplexity Allegedly Spoofs Identity to Bypass Restrictions
Cloudflare, one of the largest internet infrastructure providers, launched the investigation after several customers complained that Perplexity’s bots were violating robots.txt directives and other safeguards like Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules.
According to Cloudflare, when Perplexity encounters these blocks, it changes its identity to mimic a regular user. Specifically, instead of identifying itself as “PerplexityBot” or “Perplexity-User,” the crawler spoofs its user agent to resemble Google Chrome on macOS, a common tactic used to hide bot activity.
