Cloudflare Accuses Perplexity AI of Using Stealth Crawlers to Evade Website Blocks
The $18 billion AI search startup allegedly disguised its bots to scrape content from sites that banned it, prompting Cloudflare to kick it out of its verified bot program and roll out new anti-scraping defenses.
Personal Opinion
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
For years, search engines acted as intermediaries between online content and end users. They inserted themselves between creators and audiences, front-running information — offering previews, snippets, and answers before a potential click-through.
Now, how the tables have turned.
AI companies, the new front-runners, are raising concerns about content scraping — despite employing the same tactics: extracting, summarizing, and presenting content before users ever reach the source.
It’s not repetition. It’s poetic symmetry.
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