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Cloudflare accused Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites, a behavior criticized by Matthew Prince.

4 reports, 3 independent Updated Aug 6

Gone quiet Reached 3 outlets in its first 24 hours

Reports: 4
Developments: 4
Repetition: 25%

New informationRepeats or wire copies

AI-generated analysis. Brind wrote this summary from the reports listed below. It can be wrong. Each section says how much you can rely on it, and the sources are linked so you can check.

What happened

Well supportedReported by 3 independent outlets

Cloudflare accused Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites, a behavior criticized by Matthew Prince.

Who's involved

What this event is mainly about

Perplexity Cloudflare

How it developed

Newest first. Tap a step to see who reported it.

Jun 8Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned on July 2, 2025, that unchecked scraping threatens the internet, with media outlets like AP, BuzzFeed, and Time showing support.Sub-event
Aug 6Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites.1 source
- TechCrunch
Aug 6Perplexity's alleged scraping behavior is detailed as ignoring robots.txt, with commentary from a university researcher.1 source
- FastCompany
Aug 4Perplexity ignored explicit website scraping blocks1 source
- TechCrunch

Keep exploring

The entities involved

Perplexity
chatbot search engine
- Google, Reddit, OpenAI, and Perplexity finalized annual content licensing agreements totaling $130 million for AI use.Sat 04:41
- HubSpot was cited regarding the prevalence of spatial queries as generative search engines transform information retrieval methods.Fri 23:42
Cloudflare
American internet infrastructure and website security company
- Datadog, Dynatrace, Oracle, and Cloudflare are all operating in the competitive software industry, with Datadog and Dynatrace being direct peers in observability.Fri 20:35
- Cloudflare is running its Project Galileo initiative.Fri 17:52

Related events

Cloudflare was flagged by Darren Shaw as a potential blocker, with the New York Times citing an example of Cloudflare blocking a Shopify site's crawlers.Sep 21

Coverage

Newest first; wire copies grouped

Aug 6TechCrunchSome people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it When Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites on Monday, while ignoring a site’s spec
Aug 6FastCompanyCloudflare vs. Perplexity: a web scraping war with big implications for AI When the web was established several decades ago, it was built on a number of principles. Among them was a key, overarching
Aug 5decryptCloudflare Accuses Perplexity AI of Using Stealth Crawlers to Evade Website Blocks Perplexity's crawlers kept accessing content from tens of thousands of websites even after those sites explicitly bl
Aug 4TechCrunchPerplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be s