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The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall
(www.searchenginejournal.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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I actually agree with them
This feels like cloudflare trying to collect rent from both sides instead of doing what’s best for the website owners.
There is a problem with AI crawlers, but these technologies are essentially doing a search, fetching a several pages, scanning/summarizing them, then presenting the findings to the user.
I don’t really think that’s wrong, it’s just a faster version of rummaging through the SEO shit you do when you Google something.
(I’ve never used perplexity, I do use Kagi’s ki assistant for similar search. It runs 3 searches and scans the top results and then provides citations)
What’s best for the website owners is to have people actually visit and interact with their website. Blocking AI tools is consistent with that.
For a lot of AI search I actually end up reading the pages, so I don’t know how much this stops that
You're the outlier, I promise. People are literally forfeiting their brains in favor of an LLM transplant hese days.
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.
i put ublock origin, or another adblock on all my browsers, including phone ones and forks.
Firefox with uBlock Origin works perfectly fine and pages load faster without the ads!
Maybe I missed something, but ublock still works very fine for me, even on mobile. And running a pihole, while not trivial, also takes care of some ad traffic. Firefox coems with a reader mode (a feature I really like even with the adblockers!).
So why do people not want to visit pages anymore, if all these tools already existed?
Most people aren’t technical enough to install an ad blocker, believe it or not.