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

Cloudflare has introduced Pay Per Use in beta, a system intended to let publishers earn revenue when AI products use their content rather than merely crawl it. AI companies define qualifying uses, such as displaying a cited excerpt or using a review to inform a recommendation, set a price, identify their verified crawlers, and report each usage event through a single API; publishers can review and accept or decline these offers through Cloudflare’s dashboard without separate integrations or contracts. Cloudflare validates that reported uses correspond to enrolled publishers, aggregates usage, bills buyers, and distributes monthly payments, while providing publishers with reporting on usage and estimated earnings by buyer and domain. The service complements Cloudflare’s earlier Pay Per Crawl model by focusing on downstream value rather than access, and it aims to offer buyers efficient access to current, paywalled, or specialized content. During the beta, Cloudflare plans to evaluate pricing, reporting, and settlement with participating buyers and publishers, while developing features such as use-context reporting and flexible pricing by content type or use. Pay Per Use is presented as part of a broader monetization framework for the agentic web, alongside Monetization Gateway for APIs and tools that charge agents per request.

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