To test this, Cloudflare says it created new domains with similar restrictions against Perplexity’s AI scrapers. It found that the startup will first attempt to access the sites by identifying itself as the names of its crawlers: “PerplexityBot” or “Perplexity-User.”

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).”