Comment by dawnerd
2 days ago
Looking at my logs for all of my sites and this isn’t a global truth. I see multiple ai crawlers hammering away requesting the same pages many, many times. Perplexity and Facebook are basically nonstop.
2 days ago
Looking at my logs for all of my sites and this isn’t a global truth. I see multiple ai crawlers hammering away requesting the same pages many, many times. Perplexity and Facebook are basically nonstop.
I just looked at the logs for a site, and I saw PerplexityBot is looking at the robots.txt and ignoring it. They don't provide a list of IPs to verify if it is actually them. Anyway, just for anyone with PerplexityBot in their user agent, they can get increasingly bad responses until the abuse stops.
Perplexity is exceptionally bad because they say they respect the robots.txt but clearly don't. When pressed on it they basically shrug and say too bad not put stuff in public if you don't want it crawled. They got a UA block in cloudflare and seems like that did the trick.
Interesting. Now they seem to claim that not only they follow robots.txt for crawling, but that they also broke under pressure and made the unfortunate decisions to have user requests follow robots.txt too.
https://www.perplexity.ai/de/hub/technical-faq/how-does-perp...
User Agent block just means they'd spoof their user agent.
What do you mean by many, many times?