💥Cloudfare VS Perplexity · AEO - Get Recommended by AI

💥Cloudfare VS Perplexity

A public feud between Cloudflare and Perplexity AI just went live and very public.

TL;DR: What started with Cloudflare publicly accusing Perplexity of devious maneuvers to avoid robots.txt instructions ended up as a masterclass on a technical distinction every entrepreneur must now understand: the difference between a "bot" and an "agent."

---------------

How you interpret this difference will directly impact your decisions on protecting your web content and ensuring its future visibility!

Cloudflare (Cloudflare's Perspective) argues for respecting the established rules of the internet. They see Perplexity's actions as a violation of trust and transparency:

"Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring... robots.txt files."

Perplexity (Perplexity's response) claims they aren't a traditional bot but a new type of "user agent" acting on a specific person's request, and that by being unable to tell the difference from a "fetch" and a "crawl" Cloudflare is technically incompetent because of it's inability to distinguish a user-agent from a malicious bot.

And Perplexity didn't hold anything back, going as far as stating that:

"The bluster around this issue also reveals that Cloudflare’s leadership is either dangerously misinformed on the basics of AI, or simply "more flair than cloud". This matters because Cloudflare′s customers... can’t afford to trust their infrastructure with charlatan publicity stunts."

----------

And later today, Cloudflare announced that they would be partnering with Openai to bring their latest open-weights models into their AI Workers service (Managed AI inference)...

The AI race, it's in full swing!

0 comments