Cloudflare Blocks Perplexity AI Crawler in Major Win for Content Creators
Ever worry that your carefully crafted content is being swiped by AI without giving you any credit or traffic? Well, it looks like one of the internet’s biggest gatekeepers is finally drawing a line in the sand, and this could change everything.
Aggressive Crawling and Unfair Use
Roger Montti reports on a massive development where Cloudflare, the company that protects and speeds up a huge portion of the web, has delisted and is now blocking Perplexity AI’s web crawler. From a digital marketing perspective, this is a huge win for content creators. For a long time, the main complaint against Perplexity has been its aggressive crawling behavior and its failure to respect the unwritten rules of the internet.
Montti lays out how multiple investigations suggest Perplexity’s bot ignores the “robots.txt” file—which is basically a website’s way of putting up a “do not enter” sign for crawlers. Perplexity was allegedly walking right past those signs. The bigger issue for businesses is that Perplexity acts as an “answer engine,” summarizing content from websites like yours without always sending visitors back to the original source. You do all the hard work creating valuable content, and they potentially reap the rewards without giving you the traffic.
A Powerful Statement from a Web Titan
Cloudflare’s decision to block the bot by default for its users is a powerful statement. It signals a major shift, where the very infrastructure of the internet is starting to protect publishers from scrapers that don’t play fair. This could be the first big domino to fall, pressuring other AI companies to be more transparent and respectful of content owners.
Implications for SEO and the Future
This is a developing story with big implications for the future of SEO and content strategy. For a deeper dive into the evidence and what this means for your own site, you can get the full story by reading Roger Montti’s detailed report on how Cloudflare is blocking the Perplexity AI crawler.