[avallach]

And then once they see that the website operator blocked the perplexity-user, apparently instead of respecting that, they not only ignore robots.txt, but actively try to bypass the security measures established with the explicit purpose of limiting their access. If this was about bypassing DRM rather than AI-WAF, it would be plainly illegal.

To me this invalidates their whole claim that Cloudflare fails to tell the difference between scraper and user-driven agent. Instead, distinguishing them is trivial, and the block is intentional.

[skeledrew]

I use Perplexity regularly for research because it does a good job accessing, preprocessing and citing relevant resources. Which do you think is better: the service respects my desire for it to do a good job and ignore site owners blocking agent access because "don't like automated agents", or the service respects said site owners' - what I consider unreasonable - desires and not do a good job for me? Expand to the inevitably increasing LLM-for-research user base.

[avallach]

I can totally see your point. It's a bit like that fight of news agencies against the free snippets and aggregations on 3rd party websites. The Internet is supposed to be open after all.

But it also feels like essentially "pirating" the webpages while erasing their brand. Maybe it's even a tolerable transitive situation, but you can't even argue it's beneficial in the same way as game piracy could be according to some. In the long term, we need an incentive for the content creators to willingly allow such processing. Otherwise, a lot of high quality content will eventually become members-only with DRM-like anti agent protections.

The incentive doesn't have to be monetary. I could for example imagine some website owners allow AI agents that commit to upfront verbatim repeating some sort of mandatory headers/messages/acknowledgements from the content authors, before copying or summarizing, and are known to stick to this commitment.

You can also bypass the problem already now by accessing and copying the content manually, and then putting it in the context of a tool like NotebookLM. Nobody's hurt, because you have actually seen the source by yourself, and that's all the website owners can reasonably demand.

TL;DR: why even post quality content in open if the audience won't see your ads, your donation button, or even your name. What do you think?