Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of bypassing website restrictions to access content. Perplexity defended its actions, arguing that user-driven requests shouldn't be treated differently than human browsing. The debate centers on whether AI agents should be treated as bots or humans, highlighting the challenges of balancing user access with website owners' control and the increasing dominance of AI traffic online. Cloudflare promotes its Web Bot Auth standard to address this issue, while Perplexity claims the behavior was from a third-party service.

Prepared by Jonathan Pierce and reviewed by editorial team.