The attribution dispute
The loudest early flashpoint came in June 2024, when Forbes' chief content officer publicly accused Perplexity of republishing the substance of a Forbes investigation — one that had taken months of reporting — in a form that closely tracked the original while crediting it only faintly. The published accusation framed it as the central risk of AI answer products: the work is expensive to produce and nearly free to summarize.
That is the core of the publisher objection, and it is not really about a citation link. A cited link that nobody clicks does not fund reporting. When an answer engine satisfies the question in place, the traffic that historically paid for the underlying journalism does not arrive — so publishers argue they are subsidizing a competitor.
The crawling allegations
The second thread is more technical and more serious. Also in June 2024, Wired reported an investigation alleging that Perplexity had accessed content on sites that had disallowed its crawler, and criticized the accuracy of some summaries it produced. The allegation matters because it goes to consent: a publisher that had explicitly opted out would have had its wishes overridden.
Here is the part usually left out of the coverage, and the part that actually affects you. robots.txt is a voluntary standard. The Robots Exclusion Protocol was only formalized as RFC 9309 in 2022, and it is a request that well-behaved crawlers honor — not an access control. Nothing in the protocol enforces itself. Any real enforcement has to happen at the server, CDN, or firewall layer. Treating robots.txt as a lock is a widespread and consequential misunderstanding.
The lawsuit
In October 2024 the dispute moved into court: News Corp's Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity for copyright infringement, alleging it copied their content to generate answers that compete with the originals. Perplexity is not alone in facing this class of claim, and the broader legal question — how much of a copyrighted work an AI system may ingest and reproduce in a synthesized answer — remains genuinely unsettled. Anyone telling you it is resolved in either direction is overstating.
What Perplexity has offered in response
Perplexity has not simply denied the problem. In July 2024 it announced a Publishers' Program that shares advertising revenue with participating publishers whose content is used in answers, and it has continued to make source citation a visible, structural part of its interface — which is, in fairness, more attribution than a chat assistant answering from memory provides.
Whether revenue sharing is adequate compensation is exactly what is being argued about. It is a real concession, and publishers who believe the underlying use was unlicensed regard it as payment offered after the fact.
What this means for your site
Two decisions fall out of it, and they are business decisions rather than technical ones.
First: whether to allow AI crawlers at all. You can disallow PerplexityBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and the rest in robots.txt, and reputable operators will honor it — but understand the trade. Blocking removes you from the answers those engines compose. For a publisher whose revenue depends on pageviews, that trade may be rational. For a local business or a B2B service company, it is usually self-harm: you are opting out of the surface where a growing share of buyers now form a shortlist. We have seen this happen accidentally more than deliberately — a CDN's one-click "block AI bots" setting silently removing a business from every AI answer while the site looked perfectly healthy.
Second: if you allow them, be worth citing accurately. The complaint that AI summaries are sometimes wrong cuts both ways. An engine composing an answer about your business from thin or contradictory evidence will produce a thin or contradictory answer. Clear entity data, specific pages, and quotable factual passages are what make a correct citation likely — the substance of how to get cited by AI and of our Perplexity SEO services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Perplexity legitimate to use?
Yes — it is a real, widely used answer engine, and its habit of showing sources makes it genuinely useful for research and fact-checking. The controversy concerns how publisher content is obtained and credited, which is a dispute between Perplexity and content owners rather than a reason for an ordinary user to avoid the product.
Did Perplexity ignore robots.txt?
Wired reported an investigation in June 2024 alleging it accessed sites that had disallowed its crawler. The broader point for site owners is that robots.txt is a voluntary standard (RFC 9309), not an enforcement mechanism — if you need to guarantee a crawler cannot reach your content, that has to be enforced at the server, CDN, or firewall level.
Is Perplexity being sued?
Yes. In October 2024, News Corp's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a copyright infringement suit alleging Perplexity copied their content to produce competing answers. Similar claims have been brought against other AI companies, and the underlying legal questions are still unsettled.
Should I block Perplexity from crawling my site?
It depends entirely on your business model. If your revenue depends on pageviews, blocking may be rational. If you sell products or services and want to appear in AI-generated shortlists, blocking removes you from that surface — usually a bad trade. Check whether you are blocking it accidentally, because CDN bot-protection defaults do this more often than owners realize.
Why is Perplexity not showing an answer for my query?
Usually because it could not retrieve sources it considered good enough, the query was ambiguous, or the topic is too thin or too fresh to have credible coverage. For queries about a specific business, absent or contradictory entity data is the common cause — the engine will not confidently name something it cannot resolve.
Find out whether Perplexity names you at all
The argument about publishers is not yours to settle, but your visibility inside these engines is. Our free AI visibility audit shows, with dated screenshots, whether Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews currently mention your business — and whether anything is blocking them from reaching you. See also our generative engine optimization services and AI SEO services, or get in touch.