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Your content is already being used — you just are not being paid for it
If you run a website, AI companies are almost certainly crawling it. Their bots read your articles, guides, and product pages, then feed that text into large language models (AI systems trained on huge amounts of written material). You get nothing in return — not a link, not a credit, not a cent.
Cloudflare, the company that sits in front of millions of websites acting as a security and performance layer, wants to change that. Its new Pay Per Use programme, now in public beta, creates a simple mechanism: AI companies report when they use a publisher’s content, and Cloudflare handles the billing and sends the money to the site owner.
How it actually works
Think of it like a toll road. When an AI crawler comes to your site, instead of sneaking through for free, it passes through Cloudflare’s gateway. That gateway records what was taken, charges the AI company a set amount per use, and passes the payment back to you. Cloudflare manages the billing, reporting, and payouts — you do not need to negotiate contracts with anyone.
The scheme sits alongside Cloudflare’s existing AI bot controls, which already let site owners block crawlers outright. Now there is a middle option: let them in, but make them pay.
Who this is aimed at
The obvious audience is news publishers and bloggers, but any site with original text content — tutorials, documentation, reviews, forums — is potentially in scope. If you already use Cloudflare as your DNS or reverse proxy (a server that sits between your visitors and your origin server), you are already part of the infrastructure that makes this possible.
The beta is currently limited, and Cloudflare has not published its pricing structure publicly yet. It is also worth noting that this only works if AI companies agree to participate and report their usage honestly — a significant “if” that the company has not fully addressed.
Why this matters beyond the money
Even if the payouts turn out to be small, the principle being established here is important. Right now, the default assumption on the web is that any publicly accessible content is free to train on. Cloudflare is trying to normalise a different default: access costs something.
For independent site owners in particular, this could eventually make the difference between a site being economically viable and being quietly abandoned. Whether the AI companies play along — or simply reroute around this toll gate — will determine how much this matters in practice. Watch this space.
