> why does perplexity even need to crawl websites?

I was recently working on a project where I needed to find out the published date for a lot of article links and this came helpful. Not sure if it's changed recently but asking ChatGPT, Gemini etc didn't work and it said that it doesn't have access to the current websites. However, asking perplexity, it fetched the website in real time and gave me the info I needed.

I do agree with the rest of your comment that this is not a random robot crawling. It was doing what a real user (me) asked it to fetch.