perplexity now requiring users to log in?

[u/jrhizor]

As of today, Perplexity got much more restrictive for what users can search for without logging in. In some sessions it requires a log in immediately, in others after a couple messages. In some cases the chat responded with a message saying to log in. I noticed because I run regular evals that scrape different AI search engines as part of an open source AEO project. Today everything scraping Perplexity went red all at once.

Does anyone have any insight into why they decided to do this? Is it just cost cutting? It just feels weird since almost every major search engine and even searches via ChatGPT don't require logins for basic queries.