Exposed: Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI operates an AI-powered search engine that provides direct answers with citations, positioning itself as a Google Search alternative. With over 100 million monthly users, Perplexity processes search queries that reveal user intent, interests, and information needs. The company was found to be scraping website content despite robots.txt restrictions, with publishers including Forbes, Conde Nast, and the New York Times accusing Perplexity of plagiarizing their content to generate AI answers without permission or compensation. Perplexity's crawler was documented ignoring standard web crawling protocols, accessing content behind paywalls, and reproducing substantial portions of articles verbatim with minimal attribution. The company collects search queries, clicked citations, session data, and browsing patterns that together create a detailed profile of user interests and concerns. Unlike traditional search engines that show links, Perplexity synthesizes content from multiple sources, meaning users often never visit the original publisher's site, depriving creators of traffic and ad revenue. While Perplexity offers a privacy-focused search experience compared to Google, the company's aggressive content scraping practices have drawn criticism from publishers and raised questions about the sustainability of building an AI business on other people's content.