Taking down the content because you're annoyed that people are asking questions about it via an LLM interface doesn't seem like you're winning.

It's also a gift to your competitors.

You're certainly free to do it. It's just a really faint example of you being "in control" much less winning over LLM agents: Ok, so the people who cared about your content can't access it anymore because you "got back" at Perplexity, a company who will never notice.

> Then nobody gets the content, and we can all thank upstanding companies like Perplexity for that collapse of trust.

But they didn't take down the content, you did. When people running websites take down content because people use Firefox with ad-blockers, I don't blame Firefox either, I blame the website.

You don't win, because presumably you were providing the content for some reason, and forcing yourself to take it down is contrary to whatever reason that was in the first place.

You can limit access, sure: with ACLs, putting content behind login, certificate based mechanisms, and at the end of the day -a power cord-.

But really, controlling which automated retrieval tools are allowed has always been more of a code of honor than a technical control. And that trust you mention has always been broken. For as long as I can remember anyway. Remember LexiBot and AltaVista?