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

Summary

AI answer engines can read a publisher’s page and deliver a summary without the reader ever visiting the site, costing the publisher the visit and its associated revenue. Most publishers cannot negotiate individual licensing deals, and no AI company can contract with millions of sites. Pay Per Use, now in beta, is Cloudflare’s system that lets a buyer define a specific use of content and a price, and lets each publisher choose whether to accept that offer. The buyer reports each downstream use through a single Cloudflare API endpoint, and Cloudflare then bills the buyer and pays the publisher monthly. Publishers can track estimated earnings and usage by buyer and domain in the Cloudflare dashboard, with planned future enhancements such as report context like keywords or product type.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Pay Per Use charges only for verified downstream use (e.g., an excerpt shown to a user) rather than for every crawl, which can bring more buyers to the table.

2. 2

   Each AI company defines its own paid use and price in a program; publishers choose which programs to join and can stop participating at any time.

3. 3

   Buyers report usage via one Cloudflare API; Cloudflare handles verification, billing, and monthly payouts to publishers, removing the need for thousands of individual integrations.

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