Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of using stealth crawling techniques to evade network blocks

Cybersecurity company Cloudflare has accused artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity, led by IIT Madras alumnus Arvind Srinivas, of using stealth techniques to bypass website restrictions and continue crawling content despite directives against such activity.

In a blog post, Cloudflare alleged that Perplexity initially uses a declared user agent for its bots, and later switches to undeclared, generic browser signatures and rotates IP addresses when it finds network blocks or robots.txt disallow directives. The company added that this indicates…