Cloudflare’s new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers’ content

The latter is now also evolving into “Pay Per Use,” the company said, which will allow publishers to charge AI companies when their content creates value, not just when it’s fetched.

The change could also help conserve publishers’ bandwidth and compute resources for AI model providers, as Cloudflare’s data suggested that over 50% of crawl traffic from AI crawlers is spent re-fetching unchanged pages.

To put this into action, Cloudflare is initially working with two partners, Ceramic.ai and You.com. When a publisher opts in, they’re paid when their content appears in Ceramic’s AI search results or when You.com accesses a piece of their premium content.

Other AI companies can customize this model for how they work, Cloudflare says.