Cloudflare Stock Surges 4.34% as Perplexity AI Delisted Over Stealth Crawling Trading Volume Ranks 123rd After 41.54% Drop

Cloudflare (NET) surged 4.34% on August 4, 2025, with a trading volume of $0.76 billion, marking a 41.54% drop from the prior day’s volume and ranking 123rd in market activity. The stock’s performance followed Cloudflare’s public announcement that it had delisted Perplexity AI as a verified bot and implemented new rules to block the company’s stealth crawling tactics. These measures aim to enforce compliance with web crawling norms, including adherence to robots.txt protocols and transparency in bot operations.

Cloudflare detailed that Perplexity employed rotating IP addresses, unlisted ASNs, and spoofed user agents—such as mimicking Google Chrome on macOS—to bypass website restrictions. The company’s investigation revealed Perplexity’s crawlers accessed content on domains explicitly disallowed via robots.txt and firewall rules, even after being blocked. Cloudflare’s bot management system now scores such activity as malicious, preventing it from passing through managed challenges. The move aligns with Cloudflare’s Verified Bots program, which requires crawlers to operate transparently and respect site directives.

By delisting Perplexity and updating its managed rules, Cloudflare reinforced its commitment to protecting website owners from aggressive data scraping. The action underscores growing scrutiny of AI companies’ data practices, as content creators and publishers increasingly demand control over how their material is accessed and used. Cloudflare also highlighted that over 2.5 million websites now leverage its managed tools to disallow AI training, reflecting broader industry alignment on ethical bot behavior.

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