Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again

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Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again
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. Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls.

Robots.txt is a simple file websites host that lets web crawlers know if they can scrape a websites' content or not. Perplexity's officialare "PerplexityBot" and "Perplexity-User." In Cloudflare's tests, Perplexity was still able to display the content of a new, unindexed website, even when those specific bots were blocked by robots.txt. The behavior extended to websites with specific Web Application Firewall rules that restricted web crawlers, as well.

A flowchart created by Cloudflare to illustrate the different ways Perplexity's web crawlers try to access the content of a website.Cloudflare believes that Perplexity is getting around those obstacles by using "a generic browser intended to impersonate Google Chrome on macOS" when robots.txt prohibits its normal bots.

Up-to-date information from websites is vital to companies training AI models, especially as service's like Perplexity are used as replacements for search engines. Perplexity has also been caught in the past circumventing the rules to stay up-to-date.that Perplexity was still accessing their content despite them forbidding it in robots.txt — something the company blamed on the third-party web crawlers it was using at the time.

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