The tweet suggests a potential technique used by Perplexity to bypass Cloudflare's WAF and robots.txt restrictions. It alleges that Perplexity uses stealth crawlers that change User-Agent (UA) strings and rotate IP addresses. These tactics can evade detection mechanisms that rely on a consistent UA or IP to block unwanted traffic. Such a bypass is concerning because it undermines the effectiveness of security measures like WAFs and robots.txt, which are meant to control and limit bot access. The tweet calls for more transparency in bot identification, verifiable IP ranges for bots, and strict adherence to robots.txt policies, which would improve the management of automated traffic and the reliability of web security controls.
For more insights, check out the original tweet here: https://twitter.com/VidurM_7/status/1954786696983179452