Agents or bots? Making sense of AI on the open web

Perplexity argues that modern AI assistants should be distinguished from traditional web crawlers because they retrieve current web content only in response to specific user requests, use it immediately to answer questions, and do not store it or use it for model training. It contends that blocking such user-driven agents can restrict access to information for tasks such as medical research, product comparisons, and news discovery, potentially giving infrastructure providers undue control over which tools users may employ. The passage strongly disputes Cloudflare’s claims that Perplexity conducted stealth crawling or impersonated other traffic, asserting that Cloudflare likely misattributed millions of requests from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud-browser service that Perplexity says it uses only minimally. Perplexity characterizes Cloudflare’s analysis and technical diagrams as inaccurate and argues that the dispute exposes weaknesses in Cloudflare’s ability to distinguish legitimate AI-assisted browsing from malicious scraping.

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