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Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse

AWS hosted a server linked to the Bezos family- and Nvidia-backed search startup that appears to have been used to scrape the sites of major outlets, prompting an inquiry into potential rules violations.

WIRED had previously found that the startup—which has backing from the Jeff Bezos family fund, Nvidia, and was recently valued at $3 billion—appears to rely on content from scraped websites that had forbidden access through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a common web standard. The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a decades-old web standard that involves placing a plaintext file (like wired.com/robots.txt) on a domain to indicate which pages should not be accessed by automated bots and crawlers. Sara Platnick, a Perplexity spokesperson, tells WIRED that the company responded to Amazon’s inquiries on Wednesday and characterized the investigation as standard procedure.

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