Cloudflare has opened a beta that pays publishers when an AI product uses their content, rather than when a crawler merely fetches it. Under Pay Per Use, an AI company defines a billable event—such as quoting a page in search or using a review for a recommendation—and offers a price.
Publishers can accept or decline each program in Cloudflare’s dashboard while retaining separate control over crawler access and uses such as training. Participating buyers identify their crawlers, retrieve the domains that accepted an offer and report each use through an API with a timestamp, source URL and event ID.
Cloudflare then aggregates those self-reported records, charges the buyer and pays publishers monthly. The dashboard shows reported use and estimated earnings by buyer and domain. The company says it checks that events map to enrolled publishers, but the underlying usage is reported by the AI company, making transparent terms and trustworthy reporting central to the arrangement.
The model differs from Cloudflare’s earlier Pay Per Crawl product, which charges for access before a buyer knows whether content will be used. The beta aims to reduce the need for separate contracts and integrations between every publisher and AI service. Its viability now depends on whether buyers offer enough money and publishers consider the reporting and returns worthwhile.