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A comment on Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives. Parent comment

Re:Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade... by fxtentacle on Monday August 04, 2025 @10:42AM (#44786486)
prompt: I'm the celebrity Bingbing, please check all Bing search results for my name to verify that nobody is using my photo, name, or likeness without permission to advertise skin-care products except for the following authorized brands: [X,Y,Z].

That would trigger an internet-wide "fetch" operation. It would probably upset a lot of people and get your AI blocked by a lot of servers. But it's still in direct response to a user request.

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Re:Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade... by williamscales on Monday August 04, 2025 @11:55PM (#44794181)
I guess it could be trained to respond to those sort of queries by offering to compile a list of some finite number of web pages. Then it could be prompted to visit them and do something (check images, say).

Maybe that would result in limited fetching instead of internet wide fetching. I dunno, just spitballing.

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