Cloudflare flexes its monopolistic muscle – delists Perplexity as a verified bot, accusing them of not playing nice in the sandbox.

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Cloudflare has publicly accused Perplexity of using deceptive and aggressive tactics to bypass restrictions intended to block its AI bots from crawling and scraping websites. According to Cloudflare, after multiple customer complaints and internal investigations, they found Perplexity circumvented standard anti-bot protections, including ignoring robots.txt directives and rotating IP addresses to avoid being blocked.

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Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl micropayment system lets content providers block AI crawlers unless they pay to access content.

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Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl is a newly launched feature designed to give website owners and content creators control and monetization power over AI crawlers that scrape their content. This initiative responds to the growing problem of AI companies scraping vast amounts of web content without permission or compensation, which has disrupted traditional revenue models for…

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