846
The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
(www.searchenginejournal.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
846 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
75903 readers
35 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
yeah it's almost like there as already a system for this in place
THE CAKE DAY IS NOW. (i dont have an image at hand)
i really wish we wouldn't do those. feels too reddity.
but thanks.
as you wish
*monkeys paw curls and i turn into cake*
And I'm assuming if the robots.txt state their UserAgent isn't allowed to crawl, it obeys it, right? :P
No, as per the article, their argumentation is that they are not web crawlers generating an index, they are user-action-triggered agents working live for the user.
Except, it's not a live user hitting 10 sights all the same time, trying to crawl the entire site... Live users cannot do that.
That said, if my robots.txt forbids them from hitting my site, as a proxy, they obey that, right?
Its not up to the hoster to decide whom to serve content. Web is intended to be user agent agnostic.