New Delhi, Aug. 5 -- AI startup Perplexity is allegedly crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly said that they don't want to be scraped.

On Monday, Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, published a research blog stating that it observed the AI startup, co-founded and led by CEO Aravind Srinivas, using deceptive methods to hide its crawling and scraping activities on those websites.

The network infrastructure giant said in the report that Perplexity initially crawls from its declared user agent, but when it's presented with a network block, the AI obscures its crawling identity "in an attempt to circumvent the website's preferences".

AI products like those offered by Perplexity often rely on scraping ...