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The Great Scrape: How Reddit vs. Perplexity Exposed the Broken Economics of the AI Era
The internet just caught AI in the act — but the crime scene looks more like a mirror. Reddit set a “honey pot” — a fake post visible only to Google’s crawler. When Perplexity’s AI surfaced that invisible post, it confirmed what many suspected: Perplexity wasn’t just browsing the open web; it was pulling from Google’s cached Reddit content via proxy networks like OxyLabs, WMProxy, and SerpAPI. In plain English: Reddit built a locked vault, Google indexed the vault, and Perpl

Rich Washburn
3 days ago3 min read
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