PERPLEXITY
Perplexity just got caught pretending to be Chrome
Perplexity, the AI search startup, is under fire after Cloudflare accused it of dodging site restrictions meant to block bots.
According to Cloudflare, Perplexity disguises its web crawlers, switching identities, using rotating IPs, and impersonating browsers like Chrome, to access sites that have explicitly blocked them.
This adds to earlier concerns about Perplexity ignoring paywalls and robots.txt rules.
What to know:
Perplexity allegedly masks its crawlers to bypass blocks.
Cloudflare says this behaviour spans millions of requests daily.
Perplexity denies wrongdoing, but AI scraping rules are tightening.
That’s not Chrome, babe
While Perplexity previously blamed third-party tools, Cloudflare’s test found the company’s bots still sneaking through, even after restrictions were in place.
Perplexity has denied the accusations, calling the report a “publicity stunt.”
In response, Cloudflare removed the startup from its verified bot list and introduced new ways to block what it calls “stealth crawling.”
“just use incognito” – Perplexity, probably.