Reddit set a trap for the AI search company Perplexity to prove that it was scraping content from Google Search.
As part of a lawsuit against several data-scraping firms, Reddit accuses Perplexity of illegally using its content. To back up the claim, Reddit ran a targeted test. According to the lawsuit, Reddit created a "test post" that could "only be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet." Within a few hours, the content from this post appeared in Perplexity's search results, which Reddit says demonstrates that Perplexity was scraping Google's search results.
This incident is just one part of a broader fight, as platforms like Reddit try to block the unauthorized use of their data to train AI models. "A.I. companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content — and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy," said Ben Lee, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer.
