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

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.”

Some websites go out of their way to block AI from scraping their content, but according to Cloudflare, Perplexity is scraping them anyway.