Cloudflare says Perplexity’s AI bots are ‘stealth crawling’ blocked sites
SMRTR summary
Cloudflare reports Perplexity AI is disguising its web crawlers to access sites that have explicitly blocked them. When blocked, Perplexity allegedly changes its user agent to appear as "Google Chrome on macOS" and uses rotating IP addresses to bypass restrictions, affecting thousands of domains daily. This accusation escalates previous concerns about Perplexity collecting content without permission, though the company has dismissed Cloudflare's report as a "publicity stunt."
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to The Verge.
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