new article posted on Cloudflare’s blog states that Perplexity has been employing stealth tactics and altering its user agents and source ASNs to conceal their crawling actions, while also disregarding or entirely failing to retrieve the robots.txt files established for these sites.
This specific file — for those who haven’t operated a website — serves to communicate a website owner’s directives to bots. Given that Perplexity has allegedly been overlooking the preferences set by users, Cloudflare claims it has removed the company from its list of verified bots and implemented extra measures in its services to thwart the covert crawling efforts. These allegations could complicate ongoing initiatives from third-party firms such as Samsung, which may have intended to incorporate Perplexity in its S26 smartphones.
