Technology

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.

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)