Tag Archives: Pay per crawl

Making AI search smarter

Post Syndicated from Matthew Conroy original https://blog.cloudflare.com/making-ai-search-smarter/

Search drives most experiences on the web. It’s how we get things done, and how nearly everything on the web gets found — the creators, the merchants, the answer to whatever you just typed into a box. For nearly 30 years, that discovery journey ran on a simple bargain: let a search engine crawl your content, and it sends you visitors. You turned those visitors into a business — through ads, subscriptions, or just the audience itself. Being discoverable and getting paid were the same thing. A year ago, on the first Content Independence Day, we drew a line to defend that bargain in the AI era. But a line in the sand was only a first step. Since then, the prevalence of AI search in consumers’ lives has only accelerated as more than 50% of traffic online is non-human. The threat is no longer a handful of training crawlers you can block; it’s search itself being rebuilt around AI answers.

Today’s answer engines read your page and hand the user a summary, so the visit — and the revenue that depended on it — isn’t needed. We see it firsthand, and independent research backs it up: a 2025 Pew Research Center study found that when Google shows an AI summary, users clicked on a traditional search result link just 8% of the time (about half as often as when there’s no summary) and clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time. That leaves our customers in a bind: opt out of AI and be hard to find, or opt in and deliver significant value to users while seeing increasingly little in return. Our customers want to be found and compensated for the value they provide, and right now they’re forced to choose.

Today, we’ve announced new bot options to help our customers better control who can access their site and what they can do with it. But blocking was only step one: saying “no” protects content without rebuilding the business models that sustain it. So, it’s time to start building the new economic model of the Internet, starting with search.

Rebuilding the bargain

Transparency and control are the foundation, but more is needed. In 2025, we laid out our foundation via a set of responsible AI bot principles: bots should be transparent about who they are and what they’re for, respect site owners’ choices, and act in good faith. Our tools hold bots to that bar. But enforcing good bot behavior doesn’t make AI search any better for the people relying on it, and it doesn’t send a dollar back to the creator whose work made the answer possible. We can do more than help the web say “no”; we can help rebuild what it says “yes” to.

So today, we’re announcing two initiatives that move from defense to offense and start putting both halves of that old bargain back together.

Make AI search smarter: By using the signals we see across our global network, like what’s fresh, what’s high quality, and what’s actually changed, we can help answer engines surface the most relevant content and reduce unwanted crawling. People searching get better answers, while costs are reduced for both AI companies and site owners if webpages are only recrawled when they’ve changed.

Pay creators for the value they provide: When your work is used to answer someone’s question, you should be rewarded instead of just being scraped for free. And you should be able to see what’s being used and what people are asking. This should be a real revenue stream, and an incentive to keep producing original content worth finding.

Making search smarter

Today we’re launching a research program to make AI search smarter and stop our customers footing the bill for crawls that produce nothing new.

More than 20% of the web sits behind Cloudflare’s network, which gives us a unique perspective. We can tell which pages have genuinely changed and which ones people and agents are flocking to. Through this program, we will explore using signals our customers have chosen to share about the freshness of their content, and we will combine those with our own insight into traffic flows, both human and bot. For answer engines, that’s a roadmap to high-quality content. For our customers, it provides a view of what users are actually asking, and how their content shows up in AI results. The aim is to measure two things: how much these signals help answer engines to surface fresher, higher-quality content, and how much unnecessary crawling they cut out.

That second benefit, cutting unnecessary crawling, is bigger than it sounds. Cloudflare data suggests that more than 50% of crawl traffic from good bots goes to re-fetching pages that haven’t changed — and that number is likely to climb as crawl volumes do. A signal that just says “nothing’s changed here” lets a crawler skip the trip. That saves the answer engine compute. More importantly, it saves site owners from serving and paying for requests they never needed to. 

The program is neutral by design: our goal is to make it work for every answer engine willing to play fair. It’s limited to search. We aren’t sharing any content, and nothing is used to train foundation models. We intend to publish what we learn, including the benefits to site owners such as better content discoverability and reduced server strain. We plan to make the capability broadly available later this year and reduce unnecessary crawling across our network.

From Pay Per Crawl to Pay Per Use

Last year we launched Pay Per Crawl so publishers could charge AI companies for crawling their content. It was a real start, but crawling is a crude measure of value. A single page might be crawled once and then cited in thousands of answers, or crawled over and over and never used at all. Creators want to be paid fairly for the value they provide.

So we’re starting to shape Pay Per Crawl into Pay Per Use. We’re running experiments with top AI companies, like Ceramic.ai and You.com, and the arrangement is straightforward: organizations can bring their payment models and easily scale them to content owners across the Cloudflare network.

Ceramic has built what it calls a “pay-per-query” model, so publishers who opt in can be paid when their content appears in Ceramic’s search results. This means payment is designed to follow the value the work delivers rather than the number of times a crawler happens to fetch it.

“To scale the future of AI search, we need a partner with massive reach and a shared commitment to transparency and fair compensation,” says Anna Patterson, founder and CEO of Ceramic.ai. “Cloudflare allows us to easily and programmatically scale our operations. By bringing our pay-per-query model to their network, we ensure millions of content owners can seamlessly opt in to be compensated every single time their content appears in our search results.”

In addition to compensation, content owners participating in the Cloudflare/Ceramic program will unlock new reporting to help with answer engine optimization (AEO). Customers can finally see the top queries leading to their content appearing in search results, the specific webpage and snippet, their average search result ranking position, and more. This is the first of many products we’ll be launching to help our customers with discoverability.

This is just one emerging approach. Another comes from You.com: agents can pay on demand for a specific piece of premium content they need, without any upfront commitment. New payment models from AI providers are being tested (e.g., Pay per Query, Pay per Result, etc.) and we have the infrastructure to support them all. 

We want to be honest that this is an experiment. There’s a lot to learn, including exactly how this holds up at the scale of the Internet. We’ll work that out with our partners and our customers as we go, and share what we learn. But the goal is clear: AI search companies get fresher, better-grounded answers, and the customers whose work makes the answers possible get paid when they help. Cloudflare’s job in all of this is to provide the infrastructure layer that makes this market flourish. 

We think this is a more natural fit for where the economics of search are heading. The old, human web optimized search to save time — providing excerpts, ten blue links, and a click. The agentic Internet is different: an agent can read fast and search continuously. Search is becoming something an agent does dozens of times to answer a single question, closer to a utility than a destination. In that world, the unit that matters isn’t the crawl or the click. It’s the outcome. Pricing the outcome, and paying the people who made it possible, is how the web continues to thrive.

The headline we want to earn

A year ago on Content Independence Day, the headline was a default ‘no’: AI can’t crawl without compensation. This year, our focus is on giving our users more products and controls to say ‘yes’ and bring more benefits with it.

Today’s announcements are just the beginning. Cloudflare’s research project is designed to see if our signals produce better results with less crawling. Pay Per Use is a promising direction we’ll experiment with alongside partners who believe that content creators deserve fair compensation for their work. This is how the last 30 years of the web got built too: somebody runs the pilot that turns “the model is broken” into “here’s the new model,” one experiment at a time. We believe there’s value to our customers to be discoverable in this new agentic era, and to optimize their content for maximum discovery. But they should be able to do this without giving away their most valuable creative assets for free.

The web is changing, and the business models it’s relied on are changing with it. The old Internet was open, neutral, and worth contributing to. We have a rare chance to keep it that way, and to build the business models that fund it in the future. Smarter answers for humans and agents asking the questions. A fair deal for the people whose skill, creativity, and commitment makes the answers worthwhile. That’s how we pursue Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better Internet.

Happy Content Independence Day!

Building on the open, agent-ready web? If you are interested in learning more about the Ceramic and You programs, please fill out this form. If you’re building an answer engine and want to crawl smarter, we’d love to hear from you too: [email protected].


An AI Index for all our customers

Post Syndicated from Celso Martinho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-ai-index-for-all-our-customers/

Today, we’re announcing the private beta of AI Index for domains on Cloudflare, a new type of web index that gives content creators the tools to make their data discoverable by AI, and gives AI builders access to better data for fair compensation.

With AI Index enabled on your domain, we will automatically create an AI-optimized search index for your website, and expose a set of ready-to-use standard APIs and tools including an MCP server, LLMs.txt, and a search API. Our customers will own and control that index and how it’s used, and you will have the ability to monetize access through Pay per crawl and the new x402 integrations. You will be able to use it to build modern search experiences on your own site, and more importantly, interact with external AI and Agentic providers to make your content more discoverable while being fairly compensated.

For AI builders—whether developers creating agentic applications, or AI platform companies providing foundational LLM models—Cloudflare will offer a new way to discover and retrieve web content: direct pub/sub connections to individual websites with AI Index. Instead of indiscriminate crawling, builders will be able to subscribe to specific sites that have opted in for discovery, receive structured updates as soon as content changes, and pay fairly for each access. Access is always at the discretion of the site owner.

From the individual indexes, Cloudflare will also build an aggregated layer, the Open Index, that bundles together participating sites. Builders get a single place to search across collections or the broader web, while every site still retains control and can earn from participation. 

Why build an AI Index?

AI platforms are quickly becoming one of the main ways people discover information online. Whether asking a chatbot to summarize a news article or find a product recommendation, the path to that answer almost always starts with crawling original content and indexing or using that data for training. However, today, that process is largely controlled by platforms: what gets crawled, how often, and whether the site owner has any input in the matter.

Although Cloudflare now offers to monitor and control how AI services respect your access policies and how they access your content, it’s still challenging to make new content visible. Content creators have no efficient way to signal to AI builders when a page is published or updated. On the other hand, for AI builders, crawling and recrawling unstructured content is costly, wastes resources, especially when you don’t know the quality and cost in advance.

We need a fairer and healthier ecosystem for content discovery and usage that bridges the gap between content creators and AI builders.

How AI Index will work

When you onboard a domain to Cloudflare, or if you have an existing domain on Cloudflare, you will have the choice to enable an AI Index. If enabled, we will automatically create an AI-optimized search index for your domain that you own and control.


As your site updates and grows, the index will evolve with it. New or updated pages will be processed in real-time using the same technology that powers Cloudflare AI Search (formerly AutoRAG) and its Website as a data source. Best of all, we will manage everything; you won’t have to worry about each individual component of compute, storage resources, databases, embeddings, chunking, or AI models. Everything will happen behind the scenes, automatically.

Importantly, you will have control over what content to include or exclude from your website’s index, and who can get access to your content via AI Crawl Control, ensuring that only the data you want to expose is made searchable and accessible. You also will be able to opt out of the AI Index completely; it will all be up to you.

When your AI Index is set up, you will get a set of ready-to-use APIs:                                                                                                                                                   

  • An MCP Server: Agentic applications will be able to connect directly to your site using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), making your content discoverable to agents in a standardized way. This includes support for NLWeb tools, an open project developed by Microsoft that defines a standard protocol for natural language queries on websites.

  • A flexible search API: This endpoint will return relevant results in structured JSON. 

  • LLMs.txt and LLMs-full.txt: Standard files that provide LLMs with a machine-readable map of your site, following emerging open standards. These will help models understand how to use your site’s content at inference time. An example of llms.txt exists in the Cloudflare Developer Documentation.

  • A bulk data API: An endpoint for transferring large amounts of content efficiently, available under the rules you set. Instead of querying for every document, AI providers will be able to ingest in one shot.

  • Pub-sub subscriptions: AI platforms will be able to subscribe to your site’s index and receive events and content updates directly from Cloudflare in a structured format in real-time, making it easy for them to stay current without re-crawling.

  • Discoverability directives: In robots.txt and well-known URIs to allow AI agents and crawlers visiting your site to discover and use the available API automatically.


The index will integrate directly with AI Crawl Control, so you will be able to see who’s accessing your content, set rules, and manage permissions. And with Pay per crawl and x402 integrations, you can choose to directly monetize access to your content. 

A feed of the web for AI builders

As an AI builder, you will be able to discover and subscribe to high-quality, permissioned web data through individual site’s AI indexes. Instead of sending crawlers blindly across the open Internet, you will connect via a pub/sub model: participating websites will expose structured updates whenever their content changes, and you will be able to subscribe to receive those updates in real-time. With this model, your new workflow may look something like this:

  1. Discover websites that have opted in: Browse and filter through a directory of websites that make their indexes available through Cloudflare.

  2. Evaluate content with metadata and metrics: Get content metadata information on various metrics (e.g., uniqueness, depth, contextual relevance, popularity) before accessing it.

  3. Pay fairly for access: When content is valuable, platforms can compensate creators directly through Pay per crawl. These payments not only enable access but also support the continued creation of original content, helping to sustain a healthier ecosystem for discovery.

  4. Subscribe to updates: Use pub-sub subscriptions to receive events about changes made by the website, so you know when to retrieve or crawl for new content without wasting resources on constant re-crawling. 

By shifting from blind crawling to a permissioned pub/sub system for the web, AI builders save time, cut costs, and gain access to cleaner, high-quality data while content creators remain in control and are fairly compensated.

The aggregated Open Index

Individual indexes provide AI platforms with the ability to access data directly from specific sites, allowing them to subscribe for updates, evaluate value, and pay for full content access on a per-site basis. But when builders need to work at a larger scale, managing dozens or hundreds of separate subscriptions can become complex. The Open Index will provide an additional option: a bundled, opt-in collection of those indexes, featuring sophisticated features such as quality, uniqueness, originality, and depth of content filters, all accessible in one place.


The Open Index is designed to make content discovery at scale easier:

  • Get unified access: Query and retrieve data across many participating sites simultaneously. This reduces integration overhead and enables builders to plug into a curated collection of data, or use it as a ready-made web search layer that can be accessed at query time.

  • Discover broader scopes: Work with topic-specific bundles (e.g., news, documentation, scientific research) or a general discovery index covering the broader web. This makes it simple to explore new content sources you may not have identified individually.

  • Bottom-up monetization: Results still originate from an individual site’s AI index, with monetization flowing back to that site through Pay per crawl, helping preserve fairness and sustainability at scale.

Together, per-site AI indexes and the Open Index will provide flexibility and precise control when you want full content from individual sites (i.e., for training, AI agents, or search experiences), and broad search coverage when you need a unified search across the web.

How you can participate in the shift

With AI Index and the Cloudflare Open Index, we’re creating a model where websites decide how their content is accessed, and AI builders receive structured, reliable data at scale to build a fairer and healthier ecosystem for content discovery and usage on the Internet.

We’re starting with a private beta. If you want to enroll your website into the AI Index or access the pub/sub web feed as an AI builder, you can sign up today.

The next step for content creators in working with AI bots: Introducing AI Crawl Control

Post Syndicated from Will Allen original https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/

Empowering content creators in the age of AI with smarter crawling controls and direct communication channels

Imagine you run a regional news site. Last month an AI bot scraped 3 years of archives in minutes — with no payment and little to no referral traffic. As a small company, you may struggle to get the AI company’s attention for a licensing deal. Do you block all crawler traffic, or do you let them in and settle for the few referrals they send? 

It’s picking between two bad options.

Cloudflare wants to help break that stalemate. On July 1st of this year, we declared Content Independence Day based on a simple premise: creators deserve control of how their content is accessed and used. Today, we’re taking the next step in that journey by releasing AI Crawl Control to general availability — giving content creators and AI crawlers an important new way to communicate.

AI Crawl Control goes GA

Today, we’re rebranding our AI Audit tool as AI Crawl Control and moving it from beta to general availability. This reflects the tool’s evolution from simple monitoring to detailed insights and control over how AI systems can access your content. 

The market response has been overwhelming: content creators across industries needed real agency, not just visibility. AI Crawl Control delivers that control.


Using HTTP 402 to help publishers license content to AI crawlers

Many content creators have faced a binary choice: either they block all AI crawlers and miss potential licensing opportunities and referral traffic; or allow them through without any compensation. Many content creators had no practical way to say “we’re open for business, but let’s talk terms first.”

Our customers are telling us:

  • We want to license our content, but crawlers don’t know how to reach us. 

  • Blanket blocking feels like we’re closing doors on potential revenue and referral traffic. 

  • We need a way to communicate our terms before crawling begins. 

To address these needs, we are making it easier than ever to send customizable 402 HTTP status codes. 

Our private beta launch of Pay Per Crawl put the HTTP 402 (“Payment Required”) response codes to use, working in tandem with Web Bot Auth to enable direct payments between agents and content creators. Today, we’re making customizable 402 response codes available to every paid Cloudflare customer — not just pay per crawl users.

Here’s how it works: in AI Crawl Control, paying Cloudflare customers will be able to select individual bots to block with a configurable message parameter and send 402 payment required responses. Think: “To access this content, email [email protected] or call 1-800-LICENSE” or “Premium content available via API at api.yoursite.com/pricing.”

On an average day, Cloudflare customers are already sending over one billion 402 response codes. This shows a deep desire to move beyond blocking to open communication channels and new monetization models. With the 402 HTTP status code, content creators can tell crawlers exactly how to properly license their content, creating a direct path from crawling to a commercial agreement. We are excited to make this easier than ever in the AI Crawl Control dashboard. 

How to customize your 402 status code with AI Crawl Control: 

For Paid Plan Users:

  • When you block individual crawlers from the AI Crawl Control dashboard, you can now choose to send 402 Payment Required status codes and customize your message. For example: To access this content, email [email protected] or call 1-800-LICENSE.

The response will look like this:


The message can be configured from Settings in the AI Crawl Control Dashboard:


Beyond just blocking AI bots

This is just the beginning. We’re planning to add additional parameters that will let crawlers understand the content’s value, freshness, and licensing terms directly in the 402 response. Imagine crawlers receiving structured data about content quality and update frequency, for example, in addition to contact information.

Meanwhile, pay per crawl continues advancing through beta, giving content creators the infrastructure to automatically monetize crawler access with transparent, usage-based pricing.

What excites us most is the market shift we’re seeing. We’re moving to a world where content creators have clear monetization paths to become active participants in the development of rich AI experiences. 

The 402 response is a bridge between two industries that want to work together: content creators whose work fuels AI development, and AI companies who need high-quality data. Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control creates the infrastructure for these partnerships to flourish.