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.