In a debate likely to get louder as AI agent usage grows, some people say Perplexity crawling blocked websites isn't a simple matter.

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.

Perplexity says Cloudflare's analysis of its AI crawlers was technically flawedThere seems to have been a mix-up with a third-party service used by PerplexityPerplexity wants Cloudflare to engage in dialogue – not just to post accusations onlinePerplexity AI has accused Cloudflare of mischaracterizing its web crawlers as malicious bots after the latter claimed the AI company obfuscated its bot identity using deceptive strings and unexpected IP ranges.