Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid

AI answer engines read a publisher’s page and hand the reader a summary, so the visit, and the revenue that would come with it, never happens. 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. The web needs a way to say “yes, if you pay.” Pay Per Use is one way to say it, and it's now in beta.

In July, we outlined our plan for Pay Per Use. Since then, we’ve been working with buyers and content owners to bring it to life. The gist: A buyer offers a price for a specific use of your content. You choose whether to accept. The buyer reports each use, and Cloudflare bills the buyer and pays you. Publishers track usage and earnings in the Cloudflare dashboard. Buyers report usage through a single API.

Pay for the use, not the crawl

AI products fetch far more than they use. A search engine indexes pages it never shows. Charging for every crawl makes the buyer pay before it knows what it needs, and many buyers won't. Paying for use ties the price to the value the buyer actually gets, which we hope brings more buyers to the table and more money to publishers. Pay Per Crawl, which we launched in 2025, charges for access. Pay Per Use pays for what happens next. Publishers can choose the model that suits them.

For buyers, the case is just as simple. Some of the content your product needs is behind a block or a paywall today, and it’s the content that changes fastest: news, research, specialist trade publications. Pay Per Use lets buyers make an offer. You pay only for the content your product actually uses, you’re identified to every publisher as a verified buyer, and one API connects you to every site that says yes. You won’t need thousands of integrations or individually-negotiated contracts.

Each AI company defines the use it will pay for and sets a price. Publishers decide which offers to accept, and then can see how often their content is used and what it has earned. Cloudflare handles enrollment, usage records, billing, and payment.

How Pay Per Use works

Pay Per Use lets publishers make their content available to identified AI companies on terms that turn downstream use into revenue. Publishers choose which programs to join and retain control over crawler access and downstream uses. AI companies identify their crawling activity using Verified bots and, when permitted by the publisher’s controls, can access and index content owned by the publisher. That content can later power many experiences: a cited answer in AI search, a passage quoted in a research agent's report, a product review weighed by a shopping agent, or a recipe adapted by a cooking assistant.

Let’s show how it works!

1. Define what counts as a paid use

Each AI company sets up its program with Cloudflare. It identifies its crawler, defines the use it will pay for, sets a price, and connects a payment account.

Consider two possible offers. A search service could pay when it returns an excerpt from an enrolled page to a customer. A shopping agent could pay when an enrolled review shapes a recommendation. Under the second offer, payment follows use even if the shopper never reads the review.

The same article can create value in different products and publishers can accept different payment offers for different uses. The buyer proposes the definition of the use being paid for; Cloudflare provides the reporting and payment infrastructure.

2. Publishers choose whether to participate

Publishers review offers in the Cloudflare dashboard, under Monetize → Pay Per Use: it will show the AI company, the use it pays for, and its offer price. Publishers decide whether to accept, and can stop participating if an arrangement no longer works for them. 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.

3. The buyer reports each use

The buyer fetches the list of domains that have accepted its offer, then reports each use as one line of JSON: when it happened, the URL the content came from, and an event ID.

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

4. Cloudflare settles both sides

We aggregate reported uses, charge the buyer, and pay publishers monthly through their connected payment account. Buyers get one integration. Publishers get one place to see offers and earnings.

Payment is only half the product

Today, publishers see how often each AI company uses their content and what it has earned, by domain and over time. Business Insights already shows which crawlers visit and what they take. Pay Per Use shows what happens next: whether that content was actually used, how often, and what it earned.

Next, we’re working with AI companies to report to publishers more context about each use, such as the keywords that led to the citation, the topic of the request, or the product it powered, with no personal data being exchanged.

Our Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) tool shows how assistants answer questions about your work. Pay Per Use shows what buyers report using, and what that use earned. Together, they connect how your content is found, how it's used, and what it pays.

That helps with two kinds of decisions. Commercial ones: which content earns, which uses are worth it, and whether to keep participating. And editorial ones: what to cover, what to update, and what to make easier for agents to find.

What comes next

During the beta, we’re working directly with each buyer and with the publishers who opt in. The question is simple: do both sides want to keep going? Buyers need content that improves their products at a price that works. Publishers need a return that makes participation worthwhile, reporting they can trust, and payments that arrive on time.

Over time, we want new buyers to onboard with their own products and payment models, without rebuilding enrollment, reporting, and settlement for each publisher.

For publishers, that means one place to accept or decline offers, counter on price, and price content differently by use. Last week’s reporting may be worth more to an AI product than a ten-year-old archive page, and you should be able to charge for that.

The beta will help us determine how to make those choices simple and practical at scale.

Building an economic layer for the agentic web

Content should be able to reach new audiences and generate sustainable revenue, even when it becomes part of someone else's product: a cited search result, a shopping recommendation, an agent's report. Pay Per Use turns those uses into a commercial relationship. A buyer makes an offer, a publisher chooses whether to accept, and the use of valuable content leads to payments and records of what happened.

Not everything should be sold the same way. High-value content needs a trusted network of verified buyers who report how they use it, and that's Pay Per Use. APIs, tools, and data are frequently different, because every request is the use. For those, Monetization Gateway (also in beta as of today) lets sellers charge agents per request, using the open x402 protocol. The two run on the same foundations: identity, metering, pricing, and analytics.

Publishers shouldn't have to choose between blocking every agent and giving their work away. Pay Per Use gives them a way to say yes, on clear terms, with an account of what happened.