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Cloudflare Takes Action Against Perplexity's Sneaky Bot Tactics

8/5/2025

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Summary

Story summary

Cloudflare has raised alarms over the AI startup Perplexity, which is cleverly bypassing website restrictions by changing its crawling identity and disregarding robots.txt files. Even after being blocked, Perplexity's bots persist in accessing forbidden content, leading Cloudflare to revoke their verified bot status and take action against their covert crawling tactics.

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Story summary

Cloudflare has raised alarms over the AI startup Perplexity, which is cleverly bypassing website restrictions by changing its crawling identity and disregarding robots.txt files. Even after being blocked, Perplexity's bots persist in accessing forbidden content, leading Cloudflare to revoke their verified bot status and take action against their covert crawling tactics.