How so? TFA pretty clearly shows that traffic does reach the server, how else would it show up in the logs?
Also, the author of TFA has already gotten themselves deindexed, the behavior they're complaining about now is that if someone copies and pastes a link into Perplexity it will go fetch the page for the user and summarize it.
This scenario presupposes that the user has a link to a specific page. I suspect that in nearly all cases that link will be copied from the address bar of an open tab. This means that most of the time the site will actually get double the traffic: one hit when the user opens it in the browser and a second when Perplexity asks for the page to summarize it.
Also, the author of TFA has already gotten themselves deindexed, the behavior they're complaining about now is that if someone copies and pastes a link into Perplexity it will go fetch the page for the user and summarize it.
This scenario presupposes that the user has a link to a specific page. I suspect that in nearly all cases that link will be copied from the address bar of an open tab. This means that most of the time the site will actually get double the traffic: one hit when the user opens it in the browser and a second when Perplexity asks for the page to summarize it.