Perplexity knows how to steal but doesn't know how to hide

iGuRu.gr > Perplexity knows how to steal but doesn't know how to hide

Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity is releasing undeclared web crawlers that disguise themselves as regular Chrome browsers to access content from websites that have explicitly blocked its official bots, according to with a Cloudflare post.

When Perplexity's declared crawlers encounter obstacles and restrictions through a page's robots.txt or network blocks, the company changes the generic Mozilla user agent to appear as "Chrome/124.0.0.0 or Safari/537.36" running on macOS, Cloudflare said.

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Cloudflare engineers tested the behavior by creating new domains with robots.txt files that prohibited all automated access.

Despite the limitations, Perplexity's bot was able to obtain detailed information about protected content when queried, while the stealth crawler generated 3-6 million daily requests across tens of thousands of domains.

The undeclared crawler frequently changed numerous IP addresses and network providers to evade detection.


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on04/08/2025 19:22

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