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.

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

Instead, the AI firm claims Cloudflare confused Perplexity requests with unrelated traffic from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud browser service that Perplexity “only occasionally uses for highly specialized tasks (less than 45,000 daily requests).”