Reddit Sues Perplexity and Data Scrapers Over Alleged Theft of Platform Content

Reddit has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York accusing Perplexity AI and several data scraping companies of illegally obtaining and selling its content, according to The New York Times. The complaint names Austin-based SerpApi, Lithuanian firm Oxylabs, and Russian proxy provider AWMProxy as co-defendants.

Reddit alleges that the companies bypassed its digital protections by scraping Google search results containing Reddit posts. The lawsuit claims that this data was then used to train AI models and power services like Perplexity’s AI search engine. Reddit said its systems detected that citations to its content in Perplexity’s results increased fortyfold even after the company agreed to stop collecting Reddit data.

The filing seeks a permanent injunction against the defendants, financial damages, and a ban on further use or sale of any previously scraped Reddit data. Reddit stated it has spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-scraping systems to protect its platform content.

Perplexity has denied wrongdoing, maintaining that it does not use Reddit content to train its AI models and that it respects website access policies. Reddit previously began charging for data access in 2023, signing licensing deals with companies such as Google and OpenAI to use its data for AI training.