Overview
- Reddit filed the case Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Perplexity and co-defendants Oxylabs UAB, SerpApi, and AWMProxy.
- Reddit alleges the group evaded technical protections and acquired Reddit content by pulling it from Google search results using third-party scraping services.
- To support its claim, Reddit says a post visible only to Google was reproduced in Perplexity’s answers within hours, indicating scraping of Google SERPs.
- Reddit says it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist in May 2024 and that Perplexity’s citations to Reddit subsequently increased about forty-fold.
- Reddit seeks unspecified damages and a permanent injunction, while Perplexity denies training on Reddit data, says it only summarizes and cites threads, labels the suit “extortion,” and SerpApi and Oxylabs say they will fight the allegations.