Cloudflare can now charge AI crawlers to access your content – and it might just change the internet for the better

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Content creators can now control AI crawlers

Two robotic faces in green and red indicating a good bot and a bad bot representing the positive and negative impacts of AI and chatbots.
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
  • Cloudflare is introducing a way to charge AI web scrapers
  • Content creators can protect their sites from unwanted scrapers
  • Specific crawlers can be granted free access, charged, or blocked

Online creators often have very little control over the types of crawlers that can access their content, but Cloudflare may have a solution.

The company has revived HTTP response code 402 as a neat way to block or charge AI crawlers to access your site in a new feature it calls ‘pay per crawl’.

The best part is, it’s not a block or charge all control - users will be able to allow specific crawlers to access their site for free, charge others for access, and block the ones you don’t want trawling your content.

Charging AI crawlers for access

HTTP response code 402, otherwise known as the 402 Payment Required status code, indicates to crawlers payment is needed to access the content. As a result, the crawler can either respond with intent to pay, or is blocked from accessing the content.

As an added bonus, content creators with a block on their site can effectively ‘tell’ AI crawlers that they are open to potential payments in the future.

A screenshot of the Cloudflare AI audit page

(Image credit: Cloudflare)

For those thinking that someone could simply spoof a crawler that has access to the site, Cloudflare is one step ahead. An authentic crawler will use the ‘signature-agent’, ‘signature-input’, and ‘signature’ headers to authenticate themselves with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare will then compare a public key from a Ed25519 key pair that is stored in a hosted directory with the URL of the key directory and user agent information that is registered with Cloudflare, thus allowing the authentic crawler through and blocking any spoofed crawlers.

The process of routing a pay per crawl request through Cloudflare

(Image credit: Cloudflare)

Crawlers will also be able to crawl the web with a set budget for accessing protected sites using the ‘crawler-exact-price’ header to accept the proposed price listed by the ‘crawler-price’ header on the desired site, or preemptively use the ‘crawler-max-price’ when accessing a site which will grant access if the price is equal to or less than the crawler’s budget.

Cloudflare also has some theories for the potential of pay per crawl in the future. An AI agent can be given a budget to crawl the web when responding to a prompt, allowing the user to access high-quality and relevant content when entering a prompt.

Pay per crawl is currently only available in private beta, but interested parties can reach out to Cloudflare via the link at the bottom of the blog.

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Benedict Collins
Benedict Collins
Senior Writer, Security

Benedict has been writing about security issues for over 7 years, first focusing on geopolitics and international relations while at the University of Buckingham. During this time he studied BA Politics with Journalism, for which he received a second-class honours (upper division), then continuing his studies at a postgraduate level, achieving a distinction in MA Security, Intelligence and Diplomacy. Upon joining TechRadar Pro as a Staff Writer, Benedict transitioned his focus towards cybersecurity, exploring state-sponsored threat actors, malware, social engineering, and national security. Benedict is also an expert on B2B security products, including firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and password management.

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