Cloudflare sits in a privileged choke-point of the internet, peering into traffic others can’t. Now they’re playing hall monitor, publicly wagging their finger at Perplexity for “stealth crawling.” If Perplexity’s a customer, they should be furious at the breach of trust; if not, this smells like a cheap sales pitch dressed up as public service. Who appointed Cloudflare as Miss Manners of the web, or deputised them as law enforcement?
Cloudflare does allow bots to scrape sites. But in this case cloudflare was alerted by customers that there setting to disallow ai companies to access there site was not working. People pay cloudflare to specifically block perplexity bots.
