There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way people find information online.
Instead of visiting a news website, reading an article and seeing its advertising, a user can increasingly ask an AI search engine or assistant a question and receive an answer that is built from information published by websites.
That creates a problem for publishers: their journalism, reviews, research and other content may help an AI product answer a user’s question, but the user may never visit the publisher’s website.
Cloudflare has now proposed a way to put a price on that use.
It is called “Pay Per Use”, and unlike a traditional licensing agreement, it is designed to let AI companies pay publishers when their content is actually used rather than simply when it is crawled.
What is Pay Per Use?
The easiest way to understand Pay Per Use is to think of it as a meter for AI use of online content.
An AI company says what kind of use it is willing to pay for and how much it will pay.
For example, an AI search company could say: “We will pay when we use an article from a participating publisher as a source for an answer.”
A shopping AI company could instead say: “We will pay when information from a participating product review helps us make a recommendation.”
The publisher then decides whether to accept that offer.
If it does, the AI company can access the publisher’s content and, when that content is subsequently used in the way covered by the programme, the AI company reports the use to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare then handles the billing and pays the publisher.
Cloudflare says publishers can see their reported uses and earnings through its dashboard.
Why does Cloudflare want to pay for use rather than crawling?
This is one of the most important parts of the idea.
AI systems can crawl enormous amounts of information without necessarily using most of it.
An AI search engine might download 1,000 articles while looking for information to answer questions, but ultimately use only 10 of them.
Under a system that charges for every crawl, the AI company would pay for all 1,000 requests.
Cloudflare argues that this is not necessarily the right way to measure value.
Pay Per Use instead attempts to charge for what happens after the crawl.
The AI company may access an article without paying simply because it is researching or indexing the page, but payment can be triggered later if the content is actually used in the defined way.
That is the major difference between Cloudflare’s earlier Pay Per Crawl system and Pay Per Use.
Pay Per Crawl charges for access to content, while Pay Per Use is designed to charge when that content creates value inside an AI product.
What does this mean for publishers?
For publishers, the attraction is relatively straightforward.
Today, a publisher essentially has several choices when dealing with AI crawlers.
It can allow them to access its content, block them, or negotiate an individual licensing agreement with an AI company.
The problem with individual licensing is scale.
A major newspaper might be able to negotiate a deal with a major AI company, but a small specialist publisher is unlikely to have the time or bargaining power to negotiate separate agreements with every AI service.
Cloudflare is trying to create a common system in which the publisher does not have to build a separate technical or payment relationship with every AI company.
A publisher would see an offer in its Cloudflare dashboard, decide whether to accept it and then monitor how much its content is being used.
The publisher can also stop participating if the arrangement no longer makes sense.
Cloudflare says publishers will eventually be able to have more control over pricing, including potentially charging different amounts for different types of use.
That could become important because not every piece of content has the same commercial value.
What does it mean for AI companies?
The system is also designed to solve a problem for AI companies.
An AI company that wants to use information from thousands or millions of websites would rather not negotiate a separate commercial and technical agreement with every publisher.
Under Cloudflare’s model, the AI company integrates with Cloudflare once and can potentially connect with publishers that have opted into its programme.
The AI company defines what counts as a paid use and sets the price.
It then reports each use through an API.
Cloudflare handles the rest of the payment process.
For an AI company, that creates a potentially simpler way to obtain access to valuable material that might otherwise be blocked or placed behind a paywall.
What does this mean for ordinary Internet users?
Most users will not interact directly with Pay Per Use.
You are unlikely to see a separate payment screen every time an AI assistant uses information from a newspaper article.
Instead, the financial relationship is primarily between the AI company and the publisher.
The potential benefit for users is indirect.
If publishers can earn money when their journalism is used by AI systems, they may have a stronger financial incentive to continue producing the reporting, reviews, research and specialist information that AI systems depend on.
At the same time, AI companies could gain access to more high-quality and frequently updated information.
The cost of that access could ultimately become part of the economics of an AI product, although Cloudflare’s announcement does not establish that consumers will pay a specific additional fee.
The biggest question: can AI companies be trusted to report every use?
This is one of the most important technical questions surrounding the system.
Cloudflare’s model depends heavily on the AI company reporting when it uses content.
The buyer reports information such as when the use happened, the URL involved and an event ID.
Cloudflare says its system checks that a reported use relates to a publisher that has enrolled in the relevant programme.
But the underlying usage report is still supplied by the buyer.
That means the success of Pay Per Use will depend partly on whether AI companies reliably and completely report the uses covered by their agreements.
Cloudflare is therefore not simply building a payment system.
It is also trying to build a system for measuring and recording how AI systems use online content.
That record could ultimately be almost as important to publishers as the money itself.
What stage is Pay Per Use at now?
This is not yet a fully mature, open marketplace for every publisher and every AI company.
Cloudflare says Pay Per Use entered beta on 30 September 2026.
During the beta, Cloudflare is working directly with participating AI companies and publishers to test whether both sides want to continue using the system.
That means several important questions are still being tested.
What comes next?
Cloudflare’s longer-term ambition is to allow new AI buyers to join the system without having to create a completely new technical and payment arrangement with every publisher.
The company also wants publishers to have more control over their offers, including the ability to accept or reject offers, potentially negotiate prices and price different types of use differently.
Cloudflare is also working on giving publishers more information about how their content was used.
That could eventually include the keywords that led to a citation, the topic of the user’s request or the AI product in which the content was used, while avoiding the exchange of personal information.
In other words, the next stage is not simply making payments work.
Will Pay Per Use solve the copyright problem?
Probably not by itself.
This distinction is important.
Pay Per Use is primarily an economic and technical system, not a new copyright law.
If an AI company pays a publisher for using an article in an AI-generated answer, that can create a commercial arrangement between the two parties.
It does not automatically settle every question about whether the underlying copying, crawling, storage, training or generation was legally permitted.
For example, AI training raises different copyright questions from using an article as a cited source in an answer.
Cloudflare’s own system recognises this distinction by allowing programme terms to specify what an AI company may do with content, including restrictions relating to training.
The bigger idea
Cloudflare’s proposal is ultimately an attempt to change the economics of the Internet.
Pay Per Use is Cloudflare’s attempt to create a new link in that chain:
content → AI use → measurable value → payment to the publisher.
Whether that becomes a major new business model for the internet is still an open question.
For now, it is a beta experiment.
But if Cloudflare can persuade enough AI companies to pay, enough publishers to participate and both sides to trust the usage data, Pay Per Use could provide something the web currently lacks: a standardised way for online content to earn money even when the person consuming it never visits the website that produced it.