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.

Cloudflare claims the AI startup is bypassing robots.txt restrictions to scrape content, potentially exposing Perplexity to lawsuits from publishers like Dow Jones and the BBC.