Cloudflare opens beta for a system that pays publishers when AI uses their work

Cloudflare has opened a beta of Pay Per Use, a system that lets AI companies offer payment when they use enrolled publishers’ content in products such as search answers, research reports or shopping recommendations. Publishers can review offers and decide whether to take part; Cloudflare says it will track reported uses, bill buyers and pay publishers monthly.

The proposal targets the gap between crawling content and actually using it. Cloudflare argues that AI products fetch far more pages than they ultimately draw on, which makes a fee for every crawl a poor fit. Under Pay Per Use, each buyer defines what counts as a paid use and sets its price. A search service might pay when it shows an excerpt, for example, while a shopping agent might pay when a review influences a recommendation, even if the shopper never sees the review.

Publishers would accept offers through a Cloudflare dashboard, with terms that spell out permitted uses and any limits on training. They can leave a program, and the company says they do not need a separate technical integration with each AI buyer. Buyers identify their crawlers, retrieve a list of participating domains and submit usage records through a single API.

The system depends on buyer-reported activity. Each record includes when a use occurred, the source URL and an event ID. Cloudflare says program terms require complete reporting and that it checks whether a reported use maps to an enrolled publisher. The announcement does not describe an independent way to verify that every use has been reported.

Cloudflare says publishers will be able to see reported uses and estimated earnings by buyer and domain, while the company handles billing and monthly payouts. It is also working with AI companies to provide more context about uses, such as the topic of a request or the product involved, without exchanging personal data. Those reporting enhancements are described as future work, not as a current beta feature.

The beta will test whether the arrangement works for both sides, Cloudflare says. The company has not announced a set of participating buyers or publishers, nor reported results from the trial. It says it is working directly with buyers and publishers who opt in, with the longer-term goal of letting new buyers set up their own products and payment models.

Pay Per Use is distinct from Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl, which charges for access to content, and from its Monetization Gateway, also announced in beta, which is intended to charge agents for each request to APIs, tools and data using the x402 protocol. Cloudflare presents the products as different ways to meter value on the web: one based on downstream use of publisher content, the other on individual service requests.