Cloudflare has opened a beta of Pay Per Use, a system that pays publishers when AI companies actually use their content, and put a separate Monetization Gateway into closed beta that lets websites charge AI agents per request using the HTTP 402 status code, the company said in posts on its blog Wednesday. The two products extend Cloudflare's push to give site owners a commercial lever over automated traffic.

What Happened

Pay Per Use shifts the unit of payment from crawling to downstream use. An AI search engine citing an article, or a shopping agent referencing a product review, are the kinds of events Cloudflare expects to be priced. AI buyers, identified through Cloudflare's verified bot program, define which uses they will pay for, set prices and connect a payment method. Publishers review those offers and opt in from the Cloudflare dashboard, and keep control over which crawlers can reach their sites.

Buyers report each use through an API as a line of JSON containing a timestamp, the URL and an event ID. Cloudflare checks that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher, totals the reports, bills the buyers and pays publishers monthly. Publishers get a dashboard of estimated earnings and reported uses over time, broken down by buyer and domain. Cloudflare said it is also working on reporting that adds context, such as the keywords that led to a citation, without exchanging personal data.

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The new product sits alongside Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, which charges for crawler access itself. Publishers can choose either model. Cloudflare did not name any participating AI companies or publishers, and did not disclose prices.

The Agent Payment Layer

Monetization Gateway targets a different transaction: an agent paying for an API call, a query or a batch of tokens at the moment it makes the request. A server responds with HTTP 402 "Payment Required" and the agent pays inline under the open x402 protocol, without being redirected to a checkout. Payments settle in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, on the Base blockchain through Coinbase's x402 facilitator. Sellers can use fixed prices, variable prices tied to consumption, or let their own server set the price.

Four services are already running on it in production, according to Cloudflare: its own AI Gateway for per-token inference payments, Ceramic.ai's web search API, Stocktwits for market signal data and API2PDF for document generation. The beta is limited to eligible U.S.-based sellers and buyers, with other regions planned.

Cloudflare also put an Auto Router into public beta on its AI Gateway. It classifies each request by complexity and other factors, then picks a model by weighing expected quality against cost.

Why It Matters

Publishers have argued that AI answer engines reduce clicks to their sites while relying on their reporting. Charging per crawl does not capture how often a page is reused in answers; charging per citation does, but only if buyers report honestly. Cloudflare's design leaves reporting in the buyer's hands, with Cloudflare validating rather than independently observing each use, so trust in those reports will decide whether publishers see the model as fair.

Because Cloudflare sits in front of a large share of websites, it can offer one integration point to both sides of the market, which neither individual publishers nor AI companies can easily replicate.

What to Watch

The key test is whether major AI search and assistant providers sign on as Pay Per Use buyers and publish what they will pay. For the gateway, watch for expansion beyond the U.S. and whether payment flows settled in stablecoins draw interest from sellers outside the crypto and developer-tools niche.