Cloudflare opens Pay Per Use beta so publishers can charge AI firms

Paying for use instead of the crawl

Cloudflare argues that AI answer engines read a publisher's page and give the reader a summary, so the visit, and the revenue that would come with it, never happens. According to the company, most publishers will never sign a licensing deal with the companies that use their work in AI products, and no company can negotiate with millions of sites.

Pay Per Use is meant to give the web a way to say "yes, if you pay." Cloudflare says it outlined the plan in July and has since worked with buyers and content owners on the beta.

The company distinguishes the model from Pay Per Crawl, which it launched in 2025 and which charges for access. Cloudflare says AI products fetch far more than they use, and a search engine, for example, indexes pages it never shows. Charging for every crawl means the buyer pays before it knows what it needs. Paying for use ties the price to the value the buyer actually gets, which Cloudflare hopes will bring more buyers and more money to publishers. Publishers can choose the model that suits them.

How the process works

Cloudflare describes four steps.

• Define the paid use. Each AI company sets up a program with Cloudflare. It identifies its crawler, defines the use it will pay for, sets a price and connects a payment account. A search service could pay when it returns an excerpt from an enrolled page. A shopping agent could pay when an enrolled review shapes a recommendation, even if the shopper never reads the review.
• Publishers choose. Offers appear in the Cloudflare dashboard under Monetize → Pay Per Use, showing the AI company, the use it pays for and the offer price. Publishers can accept, and can stop participating later. Cloudflare says there is no origin change or technical integration with each AI company. Each program's terms also define what the AI company may do with the content, including any restrictions on training.
• Buyers report each use. The buyer fetches the list of domains that accepted its offer, then reports each use as one line of JSON containing the time, the source URL and an event ID, through a single API.
• Cloudflare settles. The company aggregates reported uses, charges the buyer and pays publishers monthly through their connected payment account.

Reporting is self-reported. Cloudflare says the program terms require complete reporting, and that it checks that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher.

Visibility and what comes next

Publishers can already see how often each AI company uses their content and what it has earned, by domain and over time. Cloudflare says its Business Insights tool shows which crawlers visit, while Pay Per Use shows whether content was actually used. Its Answer Engine Optimization tool shows how assistants answer questions about a publisher's work. Together, the company says, they connect how content is found, how it is used and what it pays.

Cloudflare says it is working with AI companies to give publishers more context about each use, such as the keywords behind a citation, the topic of the request or the product it powered, with no personal data exchanged.

During the beta, Cloudflare is working directly with each buyer and with publishers who opt in. The test, it says, is whether both sides want to continue. Over time it wants new buyers to onboard with their own products and payment models. For publishers, that could mean accepting or declining offers in one place, countering on price and pricing content differently by use. Cloudflare gives the example that last week's reporting may be worth more to an AI product than a ten-year-old archive page.

Monetization Gateway for APIs and data

Cloudflare also says Monetization Gateway is in beta as of the same day. It lets sellers charge agents per request using the open x402 protocol, which suits APIs, tools and data where every request is the use. According to Cloudflare, both products run on the same foundations: identity, metering, pricing and analytics.

For publishers, the pitch is that they need not choose between blocking every agent and giving their work away. For AI companies, Cloudflare says one API connects them to every site that says yes, without thousands of integrations or individually negotiated contracts. Whether enough buyers and publishers join will decide if the model works at scale.