Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid

AI answer engines read a publisher’s page and hand the reader a summary, so the visit, and the revenue that would come with it, never happens. Most publishers will never sign a licensing deal with the companies that use their work in AI products, and no company can negotiate with millions of sites. The web needs a way to say “yes, if you pay.” Pay Per Use is one way to say it, and it's now in beta.

In July, we outlined our plan for Pay Per Use. Since then, we’ve been working with buyers and content owners to bring it to life. The gist: 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. Publishers track usage and earnings in the Cloudflare dashboard. Buyers report usage through a single API.

AI products fetch far more than they use. A search engine indexes pages it never shows. Charging for every crawl makes the buyer pay before it knows what it needs, and many buyers won't. Paying for use ties the price to the value the buyer actually gets, which we hope brings more buyers to the table and more money to publishers. Pay Per Crawl, which we launched in 2025, charges for access. Pay Per Use pays for what happens next. Publishers can choose the model that suits them.

For buyers, the case is just as simple. Some of the content your product needs is behind a block or a paywall today, and it’s the content that changes fastest: news, research, specialist trade publications. Pay Per Use lets buyers make an offer. You pay only for the content your product actually uses, you’re identified to every publisher as a verified buyer, and one API connects you to every site that says yes. You won’t need thousands of integrations or individually-negotiated contracts.