> your web browser isn't between other users and the website, turning 500 views into one.

There are a lot of people making this assumption about the way Perplexity is working, but there is no evidence in TFA that Perplexity is caching its ad hoc requests.

And even if they were, what's left unsaid is why it even would matter if 500 views turned into one. It matters either because of lost ad revenue or lost ability to track the users' behavior. Personally, I'm okay with moving past that phase of the internet's life and look forward to new business models that aren't built around getting large numbers of "views".

> The flaw with that example is your web browser isn't between other users and the website, turning 500 views into one.

So, a caching proxy? That has its own issues, but it's the opposite of access by automaton. One button press causes less than one access to the server. Though one button press still results in one user view, so it's only reducing loads in some ways.

But also is that happening here?

> And if we took the analogy to the other end, one could argue that all crawlers have to be kicked off manually at some point...

One button press causing a million page loads is access by automaton. The distinction seems pretty simple to me.