The Internet has a second audience

Cloudflare argues that AI agents have become a major second audience for the Internet, with AI-agent requests on its network rising more than 1,700% over the past year and nonhuman traffic now exceeding half of overall traffic, while websites face declining human referrals, advertising exposure, and revenue despite increasing infrastructure costs. It distinguishes agents acting on users’ behalf from training crawlers, noting that agents may represent potential customers and therefore require more nuanced controls than blanket bot blocking. Cloudflare describes tools for identifying verified bots, analyzing their activity, and separately managing search, agent, and training access, including mechanisms intended to keep sites searchable while restricting AI training use. To support new business models, it is developing Pay Per Use for compensating publishers when AI systems use content and a Monetization Gateway that enables sites to charge agents directly through HTTP 402 and the x402 protocol for data, APIs, and other services. The company is also pursuing efficiency measures such as agent-readable Markdown pages, WebMCP actions, crawler bandwidth reporting, and research with OpenAI on more efficient discovery and indexing, while advocating open standards and interoperable payment, identity, and access systems rather than centralized control of the emerging agent-driven web.

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