Cloudflare opens Pay Per Use beta
Cloudflare has launched a beta of Pay Per Use, which bills AI companies each time they actually use a publisher's content, not for crawling it, so small sites can earn without negotiating licensing deals.
Cloudflare announced that Pay Per Use is now in beta. The company first outlined the plan in July. The aim is to give publishers a way to say "yes, if you pay" to AI answer engines, whose summaries take away the visits and revenue a page would otherwise get.
The model works differently from Pay Per Crawl, which Cloudflare launched in 2025 and which charges for access. Under Pay Per Use, each AI company identifies its crawler through Verified Bots, defines the use it will pay for and sets a price. A search service might pay when it returns an excerpt from an enrolled page, for example. A shopping agent might pay when an enrolled review shapes a recommendation, even if the shopper never reads the review. Cloudflare argues that tying payment to use rather than to fetches will bring in more buyers, because AI products crawl far more than they use.
Publishers review offers in the Cloudflare dashboard, can accept or leave programs, and don't need to change their origin servers. Each program's terms set what the buyer may do with the content, including any limits on training.
Buyers report each use through a single API as one line of JSON containing a timestamp, the source URL and an event ID. Reporting is self-reported. Program terms require complete reporting, and Cloudflare checks only that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher. Cloudflare bills buyers and pays publishers monthly.
Cloudflare says it is working with AI companies to report more context about each use, such as keywords or the topic of the request, without exchanging personal data. The company has not named any participating buyers or publishers, and it has not disclosed prices.