Reddit sued AI startup Perplexity and three data-scraping firms Wednesday, alleging they collected and resold Reddit posts without permission.

According to the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi scraped Reddit data via Google search results, and Perplexity purchased it from at least one of the vendors.

The lawsuit claims the defendants masked their identities, hid their locations, and disguised web scrapers to bypass Reddit’s security measures. Reddit says it caught Perplexity “red-handed” using digital markers to confirm the AI startup was accessing scraped content, and that the company ignored a cease-and-desist warning about the commercial use of its data.

“In fact, Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased forty-fold after Reddit told it to

See Full Page