---
title: "Pay Per Use: when AI uses your work, you should get paid"
description: "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."
---

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

[Cloudflare](https://yomu.fyi/company/cloudflare) · Sam Else · Sep 30, 2026

**Type:** Announcement

## 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.

## Context

AI answer engines read a publisher’s page and deliver a summary without driving a visit, costing the publisher any ad or subscription revenue that would come with it. Most publishers will never sign individual licensing deals with AI companies, and no AI company can negotiate with millions of sites. The web needs a scalable mechanism that lets a publisher say “yes, if you pay.” Pay Per Use is Cloudflare’s beta offering for that mechanism.

## Approach / What changed

Publishers opt into buyer-defined programs via the Cloudflare dashboard; each buyer reports use through one API; Cloudflare aggregates reports, charges the buyer, and pays the publisher monthly.

## Takeaways

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

## FAQ

### How do AI companies set up a Pay Per Use offer?

The buyer proposes a program: it identifies its verified crawler, defines exactly what activity counts as a paid use, sets a price for that use, and connects a payment account. For example, a search service could pay when it returns an excerpt from an enrolled page to a customer, while a shopping agent could pay when an enrolled review shapes a recommendation.

### How does Cloudflare verify reported usage is accurate?

Usage is self-reported. The program terms require the buyer to submit complete JSONL records (timestamp, URL, event ID) via a single Cloudflare API endpoint. Cloudflare verifies each report maps to an enrolled publisher.

### What reporting do publishers see for their earnings and usage?

The publisher sees estimated earnings and reported uses over time, broken down by both buyer and domain, through the Cloudflare dashboard under Monetize. Planned future reporting will add more context such as keywords or the product that powered the use, without exchanging personal data.

**Tags:** [AI](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai), [AI Search](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-search), [Cloudflare](https://yomu.fyi/topic/cloudflare)

- Source: [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/pay-per-use)
- Source URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/pay-per-use
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-30T15:00:11.704Z

[Read original post](https://blog.cloudflare.com/pay-per-use)