one year on
Reddit sues Perplexity and three scraping firms over 'industrial-scale' data circumvention
The platform says a post visible only to Google's crawler surfaced in Perplexity's answers within hours — and it wants a permanent injunction and damages.
Originally published Published on this site
Reddit filed suit Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms — SerpApi, Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy — alleging they circumvented its protections to harvest Reddit content from Google search results. The complaint calls it an “industrial-scale” scheme and compares the scrapers to would-be bank robbers who, unable to crack the vault, rob the armored truck instead. Reddit says Perplexity is a customer of at least one of them.
The company says it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist in May 2024; Perplexity replied that it did not train on Reddit content and would respect robots.txt. Instead, Reddit alleges, citations of its posts in Perplexity’s answers increased forty-fold after Reddit told it to stop. To test the pipeline, Reddit published a post visible only to Google’s crawler. Within hours, Reddit says, Perplexity’s answer engine reproduced its contents.
Reddit seeks a permanent injunction and damages. Perplexity says it has not received the suit and will fight for open access to public knowledge; Oxylabs denies wrongdoing and says Reddit never contacted it. Reddit has licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, and has sued Anthropic.
The record
The Verge: Reddit sues Perplexity for allegedly ripping its content to feed AI
Business Insider: Reddit drags Perplexity in a new lawsuit, accusing it of building up a $20 billion company off stolen data
Engadget: Reddit sues Perplexity and three other companies for allegedly using its content without paying
Reddit's chief legal officer described the three scraping firms as textbook examples of illegal behavior, saying scrapers bypass protections to steal data and sell it to clients hungry for training material.
Perplexity's head of communication said the company has not yet received the lawsuit but will always fight vigorously for users' rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge, calling its approach principled and responsible.
Oxylabs' chief governance and strategy officer said the company is shocked and disappointed, noting Reddit never spoke with it directly, and argued no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them.
The Cloudflare CEO compared some AI companies to North Korean hackers for hiding their crawling activity, calling for them to be named, shamed and hard blocked.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The case survived its first test: on July 31, 2026, Judge Paul Engelmayer largely denied Perplexity's and SerpApi's motions to dismiss, letting Reddit's DMCA anti-circumvention claims proceed. Google filed its own suit against SerpApi over search-results scraping on December 19, 2025.
Filed
Compiled and edited by Adam Allcock.
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