The Internet’s Robot War: Cloudflare vs. Perplexity and the Death of Robots.txt
Hello everyone. Buckle up, because apparently we’re in the middle of a “blockbuster” tech war that’s less Marvel movie and more low-budget multiplayer deathmatch, with two companies insisting they’re the heroes while both look suspiciously like they’ve been camping in the spawn area for cheap kills.
Round One: Cloudflare Declares Perplexity the Village Villain
Cloudflare, the internet’s self-appointed neighborhood watch with an ever-growing penchant for slamming doors, has accused Perplexity – the shiny new AI search engine on the block – of flat-out ignoring the internet’s “gentleman’s agreement” called robots.txt. Yes, that ancient plain-text relic that says, “Bot, you shall not pass.” Normally, well-mannered bots like Google’s comply. But according to Cloudflare, Perplexity decided those rules were more like “suggestions” than actual house laws, switched on stealth mode, forged a fake passport, and strutted right in anyway.
Cloudflare even claims their little social experiment – creating shiny, private, no-bots-allowed websites – was met with Perplexity casually showing highly specific details about their forbidden pages. Like catching someone wearing your coat and insisting it was “just hanging there in the multiverse.” The result? Cloudflare booted Perplexity from the Verified Bots Club and posted bouncers at the door to stop their IP-hopping crawlers.
Round Two: Perplexity Says “Ok Boomer”
Perplexity clapped back, essentially telling Cloudflare they don’t know how modern AI works – like explaining ray tracing to someone still arguing CRT monitors are superior in “every way.” According to Perplexity, they’re not a real bot, more of a “user agent” – a personal search pal that only fetches info in response to user requests. No giant database building, no hoarding. Think less Elder Scrolls world-builder, more one-shot dungeon run.
They compared Cloudflare’s stance to suggesting that email clients and browsers should be suspected of subversive activity. As if Outlook is secretly plotting revolution in the back alley with Chrome. Then came the juicy subquest – Perplexity accused Cloudflare of mislabeling 3-6 million daily requests from an entirely different cloud browser service as their own activity. In other words, accusing the wrong guy because the CCTV camera was smudged.
The Crowd Reaction
Social media, inherently allergic to nuance, split right down the mana bar. Some hailed Perplexity’s proxy-fetch method as harmless – “It’s public data, so stop pretending this is an assassination attempt.” Others sharpened their digital pitchforks, branding the company as a fake AI masquerading as a fake search engine. Pretty standard Tuesday on the internet.
The Real Fight: Who Gets to Own “Public”?
Here’s the real boss battle: if every AI needs data, and every website owner is slamming shut windows like it’s Resident Evil’s zombie outbreak, who decides who gets to crawl where? Cloudflare looks ready to cosplay as the sheriff of the open web, while Perplexity’s out here warning that infrastructure gatekeeping will spawn a pay-to-play, two-tiered network. The rich data elite on one server cluster; the data-starved peasants stuck with the scraps.
This isn’t just about one AI company getting caught sneaking through the back door – it’s setting the precedent for the next phase of our internet. The “robots.txt gentleman’s agreement” is looking as quaint and obsolete as floppy disks and LAN parties, and the new rules aren’t just being rewritten – they’re being violently patched live while we’re still in the lobby.
Final Diagnosis
As your self-proclaimed internet doctor, let me deliver the prognosis: both parties came down with a severe case of PR-itis, and the primary symptom is finger-pointing combined with inflated rhetoric. Cloudflare wants to be the guardian of the gates, and Perplexity wants unlimited access because “it’s for the users, honest.” Meanwhile, the rest of us are caught in a laggy public match we didn’t join.
Verdict? Bad. It’s a farce disguised as a future-defining war over the soul of the web – but when both fighters are busy showboating in the ring, you start wondering if the match was rigged for ticket sales all along.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
Source: The War for the Web Has Begun, gizmodo.com
