Cloudflare lets sites charge AI agents per request with HTTP 402

Cloudflare announced two new tools on September 30, 2026 that let website and API owners get paid by AI agents. Monetization Gateway answers an agent's request with a payment demand and charges per request. Pay Per Use lets AI companies pay a publisher each time they use a piece of content in their products. According to the company's overview published the same day, most Internet traffic no longer comes from humans, and heavily crawled sites are seeing fewer human visits while bandwidth costs rise.

With Monetization Gateway, agents pay per request

Monetization Gateway lets the owner of a website, API, MCP tool or dataset open that resource to agents for a fee. When an agent requests a paid resource, the site responds with HTTP's long-defined but rarely used 402 Payment Required status and includes payment instructions in that response. The agent authorizes the payment and receives the resource once it settles. There is no redirect to a checkout page or a separate payment API. Sellers decide which requests are paid through rules that match the URL, headers and query parameters. They can choose fixed pricing, variable pricing or pricing returned by the origin itself, which allows charging per request, per query or per token processed.

Payments are made in cryptocurrency

According to the company, payments are verified and settled through Coinbase's x402 Facilitator. The payment currency is USDC, a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar (a stablecoin), and transactions run on the Base blockchain. The gateway handles failed payments, retries and analytics. The announcement names four early users: Cloudflare AI Gateway, which charges per inference on select models; Ceramic.ai, which offers web search to agents; Stocktwits, which provides market sentiment data; and API2PDF, which generates PDFs from documents. The service is in closed beta and open only to eligible sellers and buyers in the US for now, and Cloudflare says new geographies are on the way. Applications go through the Monetize section of the Cloudflare dashboard.

Pay Per Use charges for how content is used

Pay Per Use is built for valuable content that is crawled once and used many times. According to the page, the AI company defines the use it will pay for and sets the price, such as citing an article in a search result or a shopping agent using a product review in a recommendation. Publishers see these offers in the Cloudflare dashboard and decide whether to accept. The buyer reports each use through a single API; Cloudflare aggregates the reports, charges the buyer and pays publishers monthly. The service is in beta, and Cloudflare has not named the participating AI companies. Pay Per Crawl, which the company launched in 2025, charges for access, while Pay Per Use charges for actual use.

Both services are in beta, and Monetization Gateway is limited to US sellers and buyers for now. Because payments are made in cryptocurrency on the Base blockchain, each company should review its own accounting, tax and regulatory position. On the Pay Per Use side, it is not yet known which AI companies will make offers, and the outcome for publishers depends on that participation. To see how the model works in practice for publishers and developers, it is worth following evaluations from independent researchers.

Sources: Cloudflare: Monetization Gateway beta, Cloudflare: Pay Per Use, Cloudflare: The Internet has a second audience.