This feels like cloudflare trying to collect rent from both sides instead of doing what’s best for the website owners.
There is a problem with AI crawlers, but these technologies are essentially doing a search, fetching a several pages, scanning/summarizing them, then presenting the findings to the user.
I don’t really think that’s wrong, it’s just a faster version of rummaging through the SEO shit you do when you Google something.
(I’ve never used perplexity, I do use Kagi’s ki assistant for similar search. It runs 3 searches and scans the top results and then provides citations)
On the flip side, most websites are so ad-ridden these days a reader mode or other summary tool is almost required for normal browsing. Not saying that AI is the right move, but I can understand not wanting to visit the actual page any more.
Search engines been going relatively fine for decades now. But the crawlers from AI companies basically DDOS hosts in comparison, sending so many requests in such a short interval. Crawling dynamic links as well that are expensive to render compared to a static page, ignoring the robots.txt entirely, or even using it discover unlinked pages.
Servers have finite resources, especially self hosted sites, while AI companies have disproportinately more at their disposal, easily grinding other systems to a halt by overwhelming them with requests.
If a neighborhood is beset by roving bands of thieves, sooner or later strangers will be greeted by a shotgun rather than an invitation to tea, regardless of their intentions. Them’s the breaks. Bots are going to take a hit now and their operators are just going to have to deal with it. Sucks when people don’t play nice, but this is what you get.
I’m sure people that are attempting to drive to their house in a new vehicle wouldn’t appreciate being riddled with bullets because the neighborhood watch makes no attempt to distinguish between thieves and homeowners.
It isn’t a war zone, it’s a gated community where the guards have suddenly decided that any vehicle made after 2020 is full of thieves.
They didn’t bother to consult the residents or give them the ability to opt out of having their dinner guests murdered for driving a vehicle the security guards don’t like.
So you’re a cloudflare customer and you wish they would let the perplexity traffic multiplier through to your website? You can leave cloudflare any time you want.
🙄You’re an Internet user and you don’t like AI so you can leave the Internet anytime you want.
That’s not a good argument, what about the users who want to block mass scraping but want to make their content available to users who are using these tools? Cloudflare exists because it allows legitimate traffic, that websites want, and blocks mass scraping which the sites don’t want.
If they’re not able to distinguish mass scraping traffic from user created traffic then they’re blocking legitimate users that some website owners want.
The topic is that Cloudflare is classifying human sourced traffic as bot sourced traffic.
Saying “Just don’t use it” is a straw man. It doesn’t change the fact that Cloudflare, one of the largest CDNs representing a significant portion of the websites and services in the US, is misclassifying traffic.
I used mine intentionally while knowing it was a straw man, did you?
The same with “if it’s so easy, just don’t use it” hopefully for obvious reasons.
This affects both the customers of Cloudflare (the web service owners) as well as the users of the web services. A single site/user opting out doesn’t change the fact that a large portion of the Internet is classifying human sourced traffic as bot sourced traffic.
I actually agree with them
This feels like cloudflare trying to collect rent from both sides instead of doing what’s best for the website owners.
There is a problem with AI crawlers, but these technologies are essentially doing a search, fetching a several pages, scanning/summarizing them, then presenting the findings to the user.
I don’t really think that’s wrong, it’s just a faster version of rummaging through the SEO shit you do when you Google something.
(I’ve never used perplexity, I do use Kagi’s ki assistant for similar search. It runs 3 searches and scans the top results and then provides citations)
What’s best for the website owners is to have people actually visit and interact with their website. Blocking AI tools is consistent with that.
For a lot of AI search I actually end up reading the pages, so I don’t know how much this stops that
You’re the outlier, I promise. People are literally forfeiting their brains in favor of an LLM transplant hese days.
On the flip side, most websites are so ad-ridden these days a reader mode or other summary tool is almost required for normal browsing. Not saying that AI is the right move, but I can understand not wanting to visit the actual page any more.
Firefox with uBlock Origin works perfectly fine and pages load faster without the ads!
Search engines been going relatively fine for decades now. But the crawlers from AI companies basically DDOS hosts in comparison, sending so many requests in such a short interval. Crawling dynamic links as well that are expensive to render compared to a static page, ignoring the robots.txt entirely, or even using it discover unlinked pages.
Servers have finite resources, especially self hosted sites, while AI companies have disproportinately more at their disposal, easily grinding other systems to a halt by overwhelming them with requests.
If a neighborhood is beset by roving bands of thieves, sooner or later strangers will be greeted by a shotgun rather than an invitation to tea, regardless of their intentions. Them’s the breaks. Bots are going to take a hit now and their operators are just going to have to deal with it. Sucks when people don’t play nice, but this is what you get.
I’m sure people that are attempting to drive to their house in a new vehicle wouldn’t appreciate being riddled with bullets because the neighborhood watch makes no attempt to distinguish between thieves and homeowners.
So sad for them. Try not living in a war zone?
It isn’t a war zone, it’s a gated community where the guards have suddenly decided that any vehicle made after 2020 is full of thieves.
They didn’t bother to consult the residents or give them the ability to opt out of having their dinner guests murdered for driving a vehicle the security guards don’t like.
So you’re a cloudflare customer and you wish they would let the perplexity traffic multiplier through to your website? You can leave cloudflare any time you want.
🙄You’re an Internet user and you don’t like AI so you can leave the Internet anytime you want.
That’s not a good argument, what about the users who want to block mass scraping but want to make their content available to users who are using these tools? Cloudflare exists because it allows legitimate traffic, that websites want, and blocks mass scraping which the sites don’t want.
If they’re not able to distinguish mass scraping traffic from user created traffic then they’re blocking legitimate users that some website owners want.
Yes your “leave the internet any time you want” strawman is not a good argument.
If allowing perplexity while blocking the bad guys is so easy why not find a service that does that for you?
The topic is that Cloudflare is classifying human sourced traffic as bot sourced traffic.
Saying “Just don’t use it” is a straw man. It doesn’t change the fact that Cloudflare, one of the largest CDNs representing a significant portion of the websites and services in the US, is misclassifying traffic.
I used mine intentionally while knowing it was a straw man, did you?
The same with “if it’s so easy, just don’t use it” hopefully for obvious reasons.
This affects both the customers of Cloudflare (the web service owners) as well as the users of the web services. A single site/user opting out doesn’t change the fact that a large portion of the Internet is classifying human sourced traffic as bot sourced traffic.