The business Perplexity, which bills itself as "a free AI search engine," has come under fire in recent days. Wired revealed that Perplexity has been disregarding the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt, and has been scraping its website and other Condé Nast properties, shortly after Forbes accused it of copying its content and republishing it across numerous platforms. The Shortcut, a technology website, has charged the business with stealing its material. According to a recent Reuters report, Perplexity is not the only artificial intelligence business that is obtaining content for their technologies via scraping websites and avoiding robots.txt regulations.

According to Reuters, TollBit, a business that connects publishers with artificial intelligence companies so they can