Reddit Sues Perplexity Over AI Content Scraping Allegations

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, Reddit accused an AI search engine, Perplexity, of conspiring with several companies to illegally scrape Reddit content from Google search results, allegedly dodging anti-scraping methods that require substantial investments from both Google and Reddit. Reddit alleged that Perplexity feeds off Reddit and Google, claiming to be “the world’s first answer engine” but really doing “nothing groundbreaking.” “Its answer engine simply uses a different company’s” large language model “to parse through a massive number of Google search results to see if it can answer a user’s question based on those results,” the lawsuit said. “But Perplexity can only run its ‘answer engine’ by wrongfully accessing and scraping Reddit content appearing in Google’s own search results from Google’s own search engine.” Likening companies involved in the alleged conspiracy to “bank robbers,” Reddit claimed it caught Perplexity “red-handed” stealing content that its “answer engine” should not have had access to. Baiting Perplexity with “the digital equivalent of marked bills,” Reddit tested out posting content that could only be found in Google search engine results pages (SERPs) and “within hours, queries to Perplexity’s ‘answer engine’ produced the contents of that test post.” “The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer engine’ is if it and/or its Co-Defendants scraped Google SERPs for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data into its answer engine,” Reddit’s lawsuit said.