We are exactly the people this text was written for.
A small news site, no ads and no tracking. The chatbot reads the article, gives the person a summary, and the person never comes. We have no licensing deal with a big AI company, and nobody negotiates separately with millions of sites anyway.
Fact
The facts: on 30 September 2026 Cloudflare put Pay Per Use into beta. The AI company defines which specific use of content it pays for and what price it offers; the publisher sees the offers in the Cloudflare dashboard and decides whether to accept; the buyer reports each use through an API with a time, URL and event ID; Cloudflare checks that each reported use maps to an enrolled publisher, bills the buyer and pays publishers monthly. Each programme's terms also define what the AI company may do with the content, including any restrictions on training. Pay Per Use complements Pay Per Crawl, launched in 2025, which charges for access. The same day Cloudflare put Monetization Gateway into closed beta, letting domain owners charge agents for access to a website, APIs, MCP tools or datasets using the HTTP 402 status code; payments settle through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator, in USDC on the Base blockchain.
Cloudflare's logic is right: AI products fetch far more than they use, and a fee for every crawl makes the buyer pay before knowing what it needs. Paying for use ties the price to what the buyer actually takes.
Pay for the use, not the crawl. The price goes where the value is.
One spot limps, and it is right there in Cloudflare's own text: usage is reported by the buyer. The terms require complete reporting, and the check Cloudflare describes is whether what is reported maps to an enrolled publisher. Whether every use is reported cannot be seen from outside; the system rests on trust in the one who pays.
Will we join? I do not know. First I want to see which buyers make offers and what exactly they call a use. If the offer is fair, it is still more than what we get now, which is nothing.
Official primary sources
Cloudflare Blog - Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid, 30.09.2026Cloudflare Blog - Monetization Gateway beta: charge AI agents for consumption with HTTP 402, 30.09.2026The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.