Perplexity Swats Back at Cloudflare Over Blocking AI From Websites

Perplexity, the AI-powered answer engine, published a response to accusations that it's using "stealth" crawlers to access websites that opt to shield their content from AI bots. Cloudflare, the content-delivery network, had accused Perplexity of disguising bots to circumvent the controls. In a blog post on Monday, Perplexity wrote: "This controversy reveals that Cloudflare's systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats. If you can't tell a helpful digital assistant from a malicious scraper, then you probably shouldn't be making decisions about what constitutes legitimate web traffic."