Cloudflare launches Pay Per Crawl for AI bots

This is a clever attempt to turn AI scraping from a binary permission problem into a negotiated market. It’s not a universal fix, but it could become the default leverage point for publishers already sitting behind Cloudflare.

• –`crawler-price`, `crawler-exact-price`, and `crawler-max-price` create a real request/response handshake instead of a vague paywall.
• –Cloudflare acting as merchant of record removes a lot of operational friction for publishers who would never build billing themselves.
• –Adoption still depends on crawler operators supporting signed requests via Web Bot Auth, so the ecosystem has to cooperate.
• –The feature matters most where Cloudflare already fronts the site; outside that footprint, big crawlers can keep going around it.