Actually, no, the fact that it's a crawler is the most important fact. The reason why website operators care at all about robots accessing their site (as distin

Actually, no, the fact that it's a crawler is the most important fact. The reason why website operators care at all about robots accessing their site (as distinct from humans controlling a browser) is historically one of two reasons: * The pattern of requests can be very problematic. Impolite crawlers are totally capable of taking down a website by hitting it over and over and over again for hours in a way that humans won't. * Crawlers are generally used to build search indexes, so instructing them about URLs that would be inappropriate to have show up in a search is relevant. The behavior that OP is complaining about is that when the user pastes a URL into Perplexity, Perplexity fetches that URL. Neither the traffic pattern nor the persistence profile are remotely similar to typical crawler behavior. As far as I can see there's almost nothing to distinguish it from someone using Edge and then using Edge's built-in summarizer.