“So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string.”
Robb Knight blocked PerplexityBot in robots.txt and with a 403 in nginx. Perplexity summarized his post anyway, and his logs showed a plain Chrome 111 on Windows 10 user agent. Asked about it, the bot said it “cannot ethically access or summarize that content” right after doing exactly that. The published crawler name is for show. The real one wears a disguise.