When the web was established several decades ago, it was built on a number of principles. Among them was a key, overarching standard dubbed “netiquette”: Do unto others as you’d want done unto you. It’s a principle that lived on through other companies, including Google, whose motto for a period was “Don’t be evil.”

The fundamental idea was simple: Act ethically and morally. If someone asked you to stop doing something, you stopped—or at least considered it. But Cloudflare, an IT company that protects millions of websites from hostile internet attacks, has published an eye-opening exposé suggesting that one of the leading AI tools today isn’t following that principle.

Cloudflare claims Perplexity, an AI-powered “answer engine,” is overriding website requests not to crawl their content by

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