Perplexity says Cloudflare's accusations of 'stealth' AI scraping are based on embarrassing errors

Perplexity has strongly refuted Cloudflare's claims that it circumvents websites' "no crawl" directives by masking its web crawlers as regular browsers. Cloudflare alleged Perplexity used rotating IP addresses to access content from sites that had blocked its bots. Perplexity dismissed Cloudflare's analysis as containing "embarrassing" technical errors and called their systems "fundamentally inadequate" for differentiating between AI assistants and threats. This conflict underscores increasing friction between content publishers and AI companies regarding web scraping practices.