Perplexity hits back after Cloudflare slams its online scraping tools

• Perplexity says Cloudflare’s analysis of its AI crawlers was technically flawed
• There seems to have been a mix-up with a third-party service used by Perplexity
• Perplexity wants Cloudflare to engage in dialogue – not just to post accusations online

Perplexity 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.

Responding to Cloudflare’s analysis and testing, Perplexity declared that analysis was technically flawed and that it misattributed unrelated traffic.

Perplexity has also asserted its traffic is user-driven, not stealth scraping or malicious crawling, suggesting that Cloudflare has misunderstood modern AI assistant behavior.

Cloudflare gets Perplexity all riled up

“It appears Cloudflare confused Perplexity with 3-6M daily requests of unrelated traffic from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud browser service that Perplexity only occasionally uses for highly specialized tasks (less than 45,000 daily requests),” the company wrote in an X post.

Hitting back at Cloudflare’s obfuscation claims, Perplexity said the company obfuscated its own methodology, even accusing the company of pulling off a stunt to gain attention.

One of Perplexity’s possible explanations reads: “Cloudflare needed a clever publicity moment and we–their own customer–happened to be a useful name to get them one.”

“This controversy reveals that Cloudflare’s systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats,” the post continues.

In the post, Perplexity also offered context about how AI crawlers work: when a user asks a question, the AI agent doesn’t retrieve the information from a central database, but rather fetches it in real time from the relevant websites. This contrasts to traditional web crawling, “in which crawlers systematically visit millions of pages to build massive databases, whether anyone asked for that specific information or not.”

Moving forward, Perplexity urges Cloudflare to engage in dialogue instead of publishing misinformation about its practices.

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