Perplexity (an "AI search engine" company with 500 million in funding) can't bypass cloudflare's anti-bot checks. For each search Perplexity scrapes the top results and summarizes them for the user. Cloudflare intentionally blocks perplexity's scrapers because they ignore robots.txt and mimic real users to get around cloudflare's blocking features. Perplexity argues that their scraping is acceptable because it's user initiated.

Personally I think cloudflare is in the right here. The scraped sites get 0 revenue from Perplexity searches (unless the user decides to go through the sources section and click the links) and Perplexity's scraping is unnecessarily traffic intensive since they don't cache the scraped data.

Oh no!

Perplexity: "But that would cost us moneeyyyy!"

see, but they're not competent. further, they don't care. most of these ai companies are snake oil. they're selling you a solution that doesn't meaningfully solve a problem. their main way of surviving is saying "this is what it can do now, just imagine what it can do if you invest money in my company."

they're scammers, the lot of them, running ponzi schemes with our money. if the planet dies for it, that's no concern of theirs. ponzi schemes require the schemer to have no long term plan, just a line of credit that they can keep drawing from until they skip town before the tax collector comes

A few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.

I think it's also worth pointing out that all of the big AI companies are currently burning through cash at an absolutely astonishing rate, and none of them are anywhere close to being profitable. So pay-walling the data they use is probably gonna be pretty painful for their already-tortured bottom line (good).

You're the outlier, I promise. People are literally forfeiting their brains in favor of an LLM transplant hese days.

If a neighborhood is beset by roving bands of thieves, sooner or later strangers will be greeted by a shotgun rather than an invitation to tea, regardless of their intentions. Them's the breaks. Bots are going to take a hit now and their operators are just going to have to deal with it. Sucks when people don't play nice, but this is what you get.

When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.

On the flip side, most websites are so ad-ridden these days a reader mode or other summary tool is almost required for normal browsing. Not saying that AI is the right move, but I can understand not wanting to visit the actual page any more.

Just buy cloudflare duh

Cry more, Perplexity.

But the website owner can still choose to continue blocking them right? Without using additional stuff like Anubis that is.

The amount of people just reacting to the headline in the comments on these kinds of articles is always surprising.

Your browser acts as an agent too, you don’t manually visit every script link, image source and CSS file. Everyone has experienced how annoying it is to have your browser be targeted by Cloudflare.

There’s a pretty major difference between a human user loading a page and having it summarized and a bot that is scraping 1500 pages/second.

Cheering for Cloudflare to be the arbiter of what technologies are allowed is incredibly short sighted. They exist to provide their clients with services, including bot mitigation. But a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.

Which is the point of the article and the article’s title.

It isn’t clear why OP had to alter the headline to bait the anti-ai crowd.

ask AI how to do it?

I’m sure people that are attempting to drive to their house in a new vehicle wouldn’t appreciate being riddled with bullets because the neighborhood watch makes no attempt to distinguish between thieves and homeowners.

I set up a WAF for my company's publicly facing developer portal to block out bot traffic from assholes like these guys. It reduced bot traffic to the site by something like - I kid you not - 99.999%.

Fucking data vultures.

So sad for them. Try not living in a war zone?

Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.

But a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.

Oh fuck off with that AI company propaganda.

The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It's the same fucking thing.

Web crawlers for search engines don't scrape pages every time a user searches like AI does. Both web crawlers and scrapers are bots, and how a human initiates their operation, scheduled or not, doesn't matter as much as the fact that they do things very differently and only one of the two respects robots.txt.