--- title: Cloudflare Pay Per Use: AI companies pay for the use, not the crawl canonical_url: https://tkmstudio.com/library/cloudflare-pay-per-use-ai-content language: en last_updated: 2026-10-12 organization: TKM Studio, AI Visibility & Adoption Studio, Madrid, working worldwide --- # Cloudflare Pay Per Use: AI companies pay for the use, not the crawl On 30 September 2026 Cloudflare put Pay Per Use into beta. An AI company offers a price for a specific use of your content, you accept or decline in the Cloudflare dashboard, the buyer reports each use and Cloudflare bills the buyer and pays you. What it is, what the announcement leaves open and what it changes for AI visibility, sourced to Cloudflare's own posts. On 30 September 2026 Cloudflare published "Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid" and wrote that "it's now in beta". Cloudflare had outlined the plan in July. The model in its own words: "A buyer offers a price for a specific use of your content. You choose whether to accept. The buyer reports each use, and Cloudflare bills the buyer and pays you." ## Pay for the use, not the crawl Cloudflare separates Pay Per Use from Pay Per Crawl: "Pay Per Crawl, which we launched in 2025, charges for access. Pay Per Use pays for what happens next." Its argument is that "AI products fetch far more than they use", so charging per crawl "makes the buyer pay before it knows what it needs". Publishers can choose the model that suits them. Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control documentation still lists Pay Per Crawl as a private, closed beta. The uses Cloudflare names are "a cited answer in AI search, a passage quoted in a research agent's report, a product review weighed by a shopping agent, or a recipe adapted by a cooking assistant." ## How it works 1. The AI company defines the paid use. It identifies its crawler, defines the use it will pay for, sets a price and connects a payment account. Cloudflare gives two example offers: a search service that pays when it returns an excerpt from an enrolled page, and a shopping agent that pays when an enrolled review shapes a recommendation, "even if the shopper never reads the review." 2. The publisher decides. Offers appear in the Cloudflare dashboard under Monetize > Pay Per Use, showing the AI company, the use it pays for and its offer price. A publisher can stop participating later. Cloudflare states there is "no origin change or technical integration with each AI company." 3. The buyer reports each use through an API. Each report carries the time of use, the URL and an event ID. "Usage is self-reported: the program terms require complete reporting, and Cloudflare checks that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher." 4. Cloudflare settles. It aggregates reported uses, charges the buyer and pays publishers monthly. The dashboard shows "estimated earnings and reported uses over time, by buyer and domain." Each program's terms also define what the AI company may do with the content, "including any restrictions on training." AI companies identify their crawling through Cloudflare's Verified bots and access content only "when permitted by the publisher's controls." ## What the announcement does not say The post names no participating AI company, no Cloudflare fee, no plan requirement and no country limit. For the beta, Cloudflare writes that it is "working directly with each buyer and with the publishers who opt in." Until those points are published, nobody can calculate what Pay Per Use pays a given site. Monetization Gateway, launched in beta the same day, is a different product: per request charging over HTTP 402 and the open x402 protocol, meant for APIs and data "where every request is the use." Cloudflare describes it as a closed beta for eligible "U.S.-based sellers and buyers." ## What it means for AI visibility - Pay Per Use is a revenue option, not a visibility setting. The buyer decides what a use is and reports it. The announcement describes no effect on whether or where your content is cited. - Access is the precondition. Content reaches these programs only through crawling that the publisher's controls permit. - Pay Per Use reports what buyers say they used. Cloudflare's own Answer Engine Optimization tool, in its words, "shows how assistants answer questions about your work", while Pay Per Use "shows what buyers report using, and what that use earned." ## The ten second check Cloudflare's controls only see traffic it proxies. For DNS only records Cloudflare says it "cannot optimize, cache, and protect those requests." Run curl -sI https://yoursite.com and look for a cf-ray header. We ran it on our seven sites on 1 October 2026 at 06:48 UTC. All seven answered server: Netlify with no cf-ray header. Cloudflare is not in their request path today. The announcement does not state whether enrolling in Pay Per Use requires proxied traffic, so we do not conclude more than the header shows. ## Checklist - Check for a cf-ray header on every hostname you care about. - If Cloudflare proxies you, review your Search, Training and Agent controls before looking at any offer. - Read each offer's definition of a use and its training terms before accepting. - Keep AI search crawlers allowed if you want to be cited. - Treat dashboard earnings as estimates based on self-reported usage. ## Questions people ask ### What is Cloudflare Pay Per Use? A beta program, announced on 30 September 2026, in which AI companies offer a price for a defined use of a publisher's content, publishers accept or decline in the Cloudflare dashboard, buyers report each use and Cloudflare bills them and pays the publisher monthly. ### How is it different from Pay Per Crawl? Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, charges for access. Pay Per Use pays only when the buyer reports a use, such as an excerpt returned in a search answer. ### Does accepting an offer allow AI training on my content? Not automatically. Cloudflare says each program's terms define what the AI company may do with the content, including any restrictions on training. Read the terms of each offer. ### Which AI companies pay, and how much? The announcement names no buyer and no prices. Each buyer sets its own price per use, and the offer price is shown in the dashboard. ### Will joining Pay Per Use get my content cited more often? The announcement makes no such claim. Pay Per Use records and pays for uses that buyers report. Being cited depends on what each AI product chooses to show. ## Sources - [Cloudflare Blog, Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid, 30 September 2026](https://blog.cloudflare.com/pay-per-use/) - [Cloudflare Blog, Monetization Gateway beta: charge AI agents for consumption with HTTP 402, 30 September 2026](https://blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway-beta/) - [Cloudflare Blog, The Internet has a second audience, 30 September 2026](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web/) - [Cloudflare Docs, AI Crawl Control](https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/) - [Cloudflare Docs, Proxy status](https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/proxy-status/) Check your agent access: https://tkmstudio.com/services/agent-access-check