Pay Per Use: Cloudflare wants to charge AI companies each time content is accessed, not each time a bot crawls the site

Following on from Pay Per Crawl, Cloudflare is launching a beta version of a system whereby AI buyers report every citation or reprint of a page and pay the publisher accordingly, with payments made on a monthly basis.

Cloudflare is opening Pay Per Use, a marketplace that links publishers' remuneration to the actual use of their pages by AI products. Where Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, charged for access by web crawlers, the new service only triggers a payment when the content is actually used: cited in a response, included in a summary or taken into account in a recommendation.

Offers, declarations and monthly settlement

The operation is based on four steps. The AI company publishes an offer specifying the identity of its robot, the usage that gives rise to payment and the unit price. The publisher chooses from its Cloudflare dashboard the offers to which it subscribes. The buyer then declares each usage by API, in the form of a simple JSON record (date, original URL, event identifier), and Cloudflare aggregates these declarations, invoices the buyer and pays the sums to the publishers each month.

Cloudflare does not disclose partner names, pricing, or volumes for this test phase, which is conducted on a case-by-case basis with each buyer. The service is accompanied by another product in beta, Monetization Gateway, which allows agents to be charged for access to APIs or MCP tools via the x402 open protocol.