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Perplexity is sneaking onto websites to scrape blocked content, says Cloudflare


Cloudflare has accused the AI company of bypassing websites' no crawl directives. Here's how the CDN is responding.

The CDN then set up new test domains, explicitly prohibiting all automated access both in its robots.txt files and through specific WAF rules that blocked crawling from Perplexity's acknowledged crawlers. That said, Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed copyrights in training and operating its AI systems. This follows numerous deals in which media businesses are permitting AI companies to legally use their content to train their large language models (LLMs).

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