Cloudflare blocked Perplexity for 6 million hidden requests per day

Cloudflare dealt a crushing blow to Perplexity AI, blocking the search startup’s access to thousands of sites. The reason? Unprecedented scale hidden scanning of web resources despite explicit prohibitions from owners!

According to Cloudflare’s research, Perplexity employed sophisticated methods to mask their bots as ordinary Chrome user browsers on macOS. But the digital camouflage strategy didn’t end there. Perplexity company systematically changed IP addresses, using various autonomous systems to bypass protective mechanisms like robots.txt restrictions and masked activity.

Cloudflare documented 3 to 6 million masked requests from Perplexity daily. Which affected tens of thousands of different domains.

Perplexity’s reaction only adds drama to the situation. Startup representative Jesse Dwyer categorically rejected all accusations, calling Cloudflare’s publication nothing more than a “PR stunt”. And then claimed that the bot mentioned in the report doesn’t belong to the company at all!

Cloudflare excluded Perplexity’s bots from their list of trusted crawlers and implemented additional mechanisms for blocking them.