Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

where's the front page CF callout for google search agent? they wouldn't dare. i don't remember the shaming for ad and newsletter pop up blockers.

that being said, agree with you that sites are not being used the way they were intended. i think this is part of the evolution of the web. it all began with no monetization, then swung far too much into it to the point of abuse. and now legitimate content creators are stuck in the middle.

what i disagree on is that CF has the right to, again allegedly, shame perplexity on false information. especially when OAI is solving captchas and google is also "misusing" websites.

i wish i had an answer to how we can evolve the web sustainably. my main gripe is the shaming and virtue signaling.

(as an aside, not to shift the goalpost to the elephant in the room, but i didn't see any blog posts on the shameless consumption of every single thing on the internet by OAI, google and anthropic. talk about misuse..)

Strawmen. They aren't arguing that any automated tool should be suspect. They are arguing that an automated tool with sufficient computing power should be suspect. By Perplexity's reasoning, I should be able to set up a huge server farm and hit any website with 1,000,000 requests per second because 1 request is not seen as harmful. In this case, of course, the danger with AI is not a DOS attack but an attack against the way the internet is structured and the way website are supposed to work.

> This overblocking hurts everyone. Consider someone using AI to research medical conditions,

Of course you will put medical conditions in there: appeal to the hypothetical person with a medical problem, a rather contemptible and revolting argument.

> This undermines user choice

What happens to user choice when website designers stop making websites or writing for websites because the lack of direct interaction makes it no longer worthwile?

> An AI assistant works just like a human assistant.

That's like saying a Ferarri works like someone walking. Yes, they go from A to B, but the Ferarri can go 400km down a highway much faster than a human. So, no, it has fundamental speed and power differences that change the way the ecosystem works, and you can't ignore the ecosystem.

> This controversy reveals that Cloudflare's systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats.

As a website designer and writer, I consider all AI assistants to be actual threats, along with the entirety of Perplexity and all AI companies. And I'm not the only one: many content creators feel the same and hope your AI assistants are neutralized with as much extreme prejudice as possible.

Zooming out for a second, we might be in an analogous era to open email relays. In a few years, will you need to run an agent through a big service provider because other big service providers only trust each other?