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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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And their "AI tool" looks just like the hundreds of AI scraping bots. And I've already said the answer is easy. They need to differentiate themselves enough to convince cloudflare to make an exception for them.
Until then, they're "just another AI company scraping data"
Well, Cloudflare is adding, to the control panel, the ability to whitelist Perplexity and other AI sources (default: on).
Looks like they differentiated themselves enough.
That option is only likely to be for paid accounts. The freebie users like me have to make our own anti bot WAF rules. Or, as I do, just toss every page I expect a user to be using via managed challenge. Adding exceptions uses up precious space in those rules which I've used to put in exceptions for genuine instance to instance traffic.
But I am glad they were able to convince cloudflare. Good for them.