Cloudflare is accusing Perplexity of using stealth crawlers to bypass site restrictions, triggering fresh concerns over how AI firms access web content.

First, Cloudflare accused the AI company of bypassing no-crawl directives. Now Perplexity says Cloudflare has it all wrong.

At the time, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas blamed the activity on third-party crawlers used by the site. Now, Cloudflare, one of the world’s biggest internet architecture providers, says it received complaints from customers who claimed that Perplexity’s bots still had access to their websites even after putting their preference in their websites’ robots.