Agent Identity: (Cloud)Flare-ups and Perplexed Developers
By Craig DeWitt, Co-Founder of Skyfire
There’s a full-on brawl playing out between AI companies and the bot blockers that guard the modern internet. It hit the mainstream this week when Cloudflare accused Perplexity of crawling sites it wasn’t supposed to. Swapping out IPs, changing user agents, basically acting like the very bots companies spend millions trying to keep out. Cloudflare didn’t mince words. They said Perplexity was behaving like North Korean hackers. Wild.
Perplexity pushed back hard. Claimed it wasn’t them, that most of the traffic being flagged wasn’t theirs, and that Cloudflare didn’t understand how AI traffic works. Whether you buy that or not, here’s what I know: we’re looking at a fight that misses the bigger picture entirely.
The Real Problem No One Wants to Talk About
A lot of today’s internet infra wasn’t built for AI. It was built for humans typing into browsers. But that’s not what’s happening anymore. Users aren’t visiting sites directly. They’re using AI agents to do it for them.
And that changes everything.
These agents don’t click ads. They don’t subscribe to newsletters. They get in, get what they need, and leave. If you’re a website that relies on human behavior for revenue, this shift feels like getting cut out of your own business model. So what do you do? You block the bots. All of them. Even the good ones.
That might work short term. But long term? You’re just making yourself irrelevant.
At Skyfire, We See a Way Forward
The answer isn’t “block everything” or “let it all through.” That’s lazy thinking. The answer is selective access, where agents can show up with verified identity and, when necessary, offer payment. The website gets to make this decision, regardless of their existing bot manager.
This is what we’re building with KYAPay. An open protocol where agents send a token that proves who they’re acting for, what they want to do, and what they’re willing to pay. It’s cryptographically signed, transparent, and puts control back in the hands of the site owners.
In the demo I gave this week, I showed how an agent could crawl Zillow—but do it the right way. With a token that says: here’s who I am, here’s what I want, and here’s a tenth of a cent if you’ll let me in. And boom, access granted.
That’s the difference. Not shady crawling and reverse proxying with stealth turned on. Just a clean handshake.
Agents Are Taking Over Even if Websites Don’t Know It Yet
In my post “Software was <If/Then> Agents are <Now/What>”, I laid out where this is going. Agents are going to outnumber human users. They’ll book your flights, manage your finances, order your groceries. And when they hit a wall online, your experience breaks. Not because the AI is bad, but because the infrastructure wasn’t built to support it.
Checkout a live demo today at: https://crawler-demo.skyfire.xyz/token
“Agentic Commerce” takes this further. If we’re going to build an economy that actually works for agents, we need payments and identity at the agent level. That’s KYAPay. That’s what we’re shipping.
Let’s Not Turn the Web Into a Warzone
This Perplexity vs Cloudflare mess? It’s just the opening act. We’re going to see more of these fights until there’s a framework that makes agent access sane, fair, and monetizable.
So yes, it’s tense right now and it could get worse but the fix is already available.
Here’s open identity and payments in action for agent web access:
No more cat-and-mouse. No more scraping drama. Just a functioning, modern internet that treats AI agents (and the users behind them) like first class citizens.
If you’re building an agent or defending a platform, come talk to us.
Skyfire.xyz is where to start.