Perplexity (as Scraper)

Perplexity AI is an artificial-intelligence "answer engine" that Reddit named as a defendant in an October 2025 federal lawsuit, alongside several data-scraping firms, accusing them of harvesting Reddit content without a licence. The term is included here in its specific sense as a party to Reddit's anti-scraping litigation rather than as a general description of the company's product.

Reddit alleges that the defendants circumvented protections on Google's search results to collect Reddit content at scale and then used or resold it. To demonstrate ongoing scraping, Reddit says it planted a test post visible only to Google and watched it appear in Perplexity's results within hours, and it documented a sharp surge in Reddit content appearing in Perplexity's answers after an earlier cease-and-desist. Perplexity has denied wrongdoing. The case matters because Reddit has positioned it as part of a broader campaign against what it calls an industrial-scale data-laundering economy, and because it illustrates how AI answer engines that summarise the open web can collide with platforms seeking to license and protect their content.