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

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.

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.”